The Pete Quiñones Show - The Darryl 'Martyr Made' Cooper Episodes - Complete

Episode Date: May 24, 2025

5 Hours and 15 MinutesPG-13This is an audio of the episode in which Darryl Cooper has joined Pete to discuss various topics.Episode 809: On The Ridiculous Belief We Are Ruled By Pedophile Elites w/ Darryl 'Martyr Made'Episode 870: A Look at the History of Black-Jewish Relations in America w/ Darryl 'Martyr Made' CooperEpisode 1023: Victoria Nuland, Ukraine and Russia w/ Darryl 'Martyr Made' CooperPete Reads 'Coup D'état' by Edward N. Luttwak - Part 1 w/ Darryl CooperThe Martyr Made PodcastThe Martyr Made SubstackThe Unraveling PodcastPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on Twitter

I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekina show for the first time. Long overdue. Darrell Cooper. How are you doing, Darrell? Great, man. It's great to be on here with you. Like I told you before the show, I'm a big fan. So, yeah, a long time coming.

Same here. Same here. Tell everybody a little bit about yourself. So I'm pretty much a regular person. I grew up all over California, mostly in inner cities, from the Central Valley down to SoCal. Spent a little bit of time my high school and college years up in Montana, which was nice to get a different glimpse of that.

I come from a family of veterans, and so I joined the Navy after I was done with college and did 10 years doing air and ballistic missile work, defense work, and then got out and worked as a DOD civilian for 10 more years doing the same thing, basically, air and ballistic missile defense engineering stuff. In the meantime, around 2015, I started doing a podcast just sort of on a lark, really. I was a fan of Dan Carlin's hardcore history back then, and obviously he takes six or

eight months between episodes, and I would always bitch about that. And pretty much all I do, you know, I moved around a lot when I was a kid, and then in the Navy I moved around a lot. And so my continuity was always books. And so ever since I've been a little kid, I just, you know, I've had my nose in a book pretty much during all of my spare time every day. And, you know, my girlfriend at the time and my friends were tired of hearing about the books that I recently read. And so they told me to go start a podcast. And so I did.

I did that for a few years. You know, these are, I do like long form, five, six, seven hour long episodes sometimes, really deep dives on historical topics. and they're not for everybody and I didn't really expect anybody to listen to it but it's really kind of taken off and that's been really cool And so last year, you know, I kind of was facing a point where You know I'm starting a family now and I just had to realize that you know when I was at my DOD job I was literally waking up two hours early before I had to get ready for work to read and write I was reading and writing during my lunch hour. I was spending my evenings doing that just to get this podcast done and that wasn't gonna fly anymore once you know I got a little screaming infant to deal with plus work and so I had to make a choice and

decided to cut the strands of the safety net with the government job and now I'm able to do the podcasting thing full-time I do a second podcast with my friend Jaco Willink who's a he's a retired Navy SEAL commander people may have heard of him he's a he's an awesome dude and we have one called the unraveling as well. And so, yeah, that's what I'm doing. And what's the name of your podcast? Oh, martyr made. Yeah, I'm terrible at advertising. Well, the thing I really enjoy is you'll talk about things like the Bolshevik Revolution. And you'll talk about things that are historic, but also, you're not scared to talk about things that people might, I don't know, you know, good, respectable people might roll their eyes at.

You know, so there was this episode you did, and it was about this vast conspiracy theory that, you know, has been put to bed. And it was this thing called Pizza Gate. And it was such a stupid conspiracy theory that, like, Ben Swan lost his job and had to go into hiding for a year after he reported on it on an Atlanta news station. I used to live in Atlanta and, yeah, you know. And yeah, so why did you look into this silly conspiracy theory? So I was doing a short little series for my substack followers on Jeffrey Epstein

and focusing on the, you know, what looked like connections to U.S. and Israeli intelligence and kind of deep diving on that in a way that anybody, you know, I know you've had Ryan on a few times and stuff. anybody who's listening to him isn't going to get anything new out of the the first episode and a half or so probably I mean Ryan's basically done all the work for for yeah he's done the work for all of us and there's even somebody else out there who's like making a career off of Ryan's work and not really yeah and it's kind of unfortunate because you know it's like well this is this is always tough for someone like me who has you know sort of mainstream normie connections with people where you know it's hard to just say that like you know I got this from this source Ryan Dawson over here

X Y and Z if it was just me then it would just be kind of like whatever I would eat that no problem I don't have an issue with it at all but it affects other people that I work with and so forth and so it becomes a little more difficult and it's unfortunate because like you said he's done all the work and it's really impossible to talk about the issue without ripping him off a little bit just because he did all the work like that's who did it you know and so um he just I wasn't making fun of you. I'm pretty sure you knew who I was making fun of. Yeah, yeah.

I do. Yeah. And, you know, it's unfortunate, but there's another example. You talk about Ben Swan getting run off the rails. You know, he's another person, you know, got the full Alex Jones times 10 treatment, you know. And he's not somebody, you know, Ryan Dawson's not some dude who had millions and millions of people who were following him. And they were like, we got to do something. But still, they thought it was important enough.

to basically go as hard on him as they've gone on just about anybody, which is, you know, remarkable in itself. So you started looking into this Pizza Gate thing and you, I don't know, it just seems so silly, right? Of course. Yeah. It's the most ridiculous thing that you've ever heard about. I mean, there's a satan, an elite satanic pedophile ring being run out of the basement of a pizza

shop in Washington, D.C. It's the dumbest thing you've ever heard, for sure. And so I kind of approached the episode. You know, after doing the first one on Epstein and his intelligence connections, the second one where I stepped back and I just talked about several other cases over the last several decades where things like, you know, the Finders group, things like the Kinkora Boys Home in Northern Ireland. And there are a lot of instances where there seem to be, you know,

instances of childhood sexual abuse, child sexual abuse, where there are just fingerprints of intelligence agencies all around it. And obviously when you're talking about intelligence agencies, it's like talking about the mafia. Everything's deniable. Everything is circumstantial evidence. That's just the nature of the beast. But at a certain point, you start to say, you know, if any one of these other cases, is true, well, then it's not unrealistic anymore, and it's more likely that the second one's going to

be true, and it makes it more likely that the third and the rest of them could very well be true. Once you know that three or four of these things are true, you know, that British intelligence was monitoring the Kinkora Boys home because they knew that there were a bunch of powerful people coming through there having sex with children that could later blackmail and control. Once you know that that has happened, then it's not really, you know, like I think when Most people heard, you know, Alex Acosta, Trump's Labor Secretary, who was the prosecutor of Epstein back in his first case, say on the record, you know, to his interviewers when he was getting vetted for the labor secretary job, that he was told to back off Epstein because, quote, he belonged to intelligence. Like in the world where I come from, and I'm not a journalist, maybe I should go to journalism school and they correct me on this. But I would think that there would be reporters camped out on his lawn,

and every time he poked his head out of his house, there'd be a microphone in his face saying, excuse me, sir, what did you mean when you said that Jeffrey Epstein was connected to intelligence? Obviously, that's not what's going on. And in fact, the complete opposite is what has been going on, where there's a very obvious effort, just a full spectrum effort to suppress the story, to keep questions, just very obvious questions from being asked. And so yeah, that was the second episode. And then in the third episode, I just wanted to kind of tie it all together.

And I really wasn't sure when I started it. I didn't really plan on talking about Pizza Gate exactly. But what I found was it's a good window into the culture in Washington, D.C. And it's not just D.C. It's the same in London. It's the same in just a lot of elite circles, whether it's, you know, business. you know, when you start picking through the Pizza Gate conspiracy theory and think about how did this thing start, how did it get going? You know, I kind of remember, like back in the day,

as I was watching on the chans and Reddit and everything, watching this thing, as it was unfolding there at the beginning. And, you know, starts out in 2016 because John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, gets his emails leaked. And people are going through them and finding that, you know, normal stuff that the Clinton campaign robbed Bernie Sanders and worked with the DNC to like set that up, all that kind of stuff. And people are arguing over whether this was Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump working together and so forth. But then some people came across some emails that really didn't seem to make any kind of sense if you just read them in a literal way, right? Like there were things like somebody writing John Podesta and saying like, hey, after the party

from last week, we found a handkerchief with a map that looks pizza-related. Like, do you want it back? And he says no or whatever. There's a bunch of little weird things like that that people are like, well, that doesn't even make any sense. Like, why would there be a pizza-related map on a handkerchief? And why would it be important enough that he would want to, like, you know, return it to him, whatever. And so they see that. And I believe this part I wasn't around for Somebody who was around for it told me that this was how the pizza thing got started. Was it on the chans back in the day, like several years ago, I think. People would come in and sometimes try to troll the board or get it in trouble by posting child porn or what looked like child porn.

And so to not trip the filters, they would call it cheese pizza, CP. And that that's where the pizza association came from. I'm not 100% sure if that's true or not. That's what somebody who was there kind of told me. But the point is they read, they started reading these strange emails as code where pizza is porn, cheese pizza's child porn. Maps and handkerchiefs mean X, Y, and Z having to do with this weird stuff. And then, of course, there's thousands and thousands of emails. And so if you do a search and you look for any time the word pizza shows up or map or handkerchief or whatever, it turns out that there's a bunch of emails in there that look pretty strong.

range if you apply this cipher to it. And so that's how the whole thing kind of got started. When, you know, so yeah, that's how it got started. And I believe the next thing that happened, people, well, people started doing more research. Once they got on the trail of it, somebody would bring up, for example, you know, Andrew Breitbart's tweet from back. And I want to say like, what was it, 2013 or 2014 or something? I think it was earlier than that.

I think it was 2011. Yeah, so all the way back in 2011. And what does he say? How Prague Guru John Podesta isn't a household name as a world-class underage sex slave op cover-upper defending unspeakable dregs escapes me. It's like, okay, look, Andrew Breitbart, for sure, is like a bomb thrower.

You know, he's out there like starting fights or whatever. But he's also a wealthy businessman who's got to worry about things like libel and slander suits. And so coming out and saying something like that is that's pretty serious. And he never backed down from it. And, you know, it's almost as if he was like daring Podesta to take him into court and go do discovery on it or something, you know. So people found that because they're talking about John Podesta. These are his emails.

And they go back years ago and find, you know, Andrew Breitbart basically accusing him of running an underage sex slave operation. And then after Anthony Wiener got busted for texting and sexting with an underage girl, Breitbart had been out there saying that this was going on, that there was a scandal out there for a long time, and he finally got vindicated, and he was on an episode of Red Eye, I think it was, a Greg Gutfeld. And they're talking about this, and he's obviously very excited. And Greg Gutfeld says something like, you know, he mentions something about ping pong.

and Andrew Breitbart interrupts him as he's like in the middle of a sentence and he goes, huh, why would you switch the subject to the sport of ping pong? And the guy's like, Greg Gutfeld says, oh, you know how it is. And he's like, yeah, you're weird like that, like in a very kind of knowing tone of voice, very strange. Well, the next thing people found in those emails was stuff about this place in D.C., this pizza place called Comet Pingpong Pizza. And people might remember that from the news because a dude with an AR-F, 15 showed up there to search the place for, you know, a sex dungeon in the basement.

Comet ping pong pizza, you know, it was, I mean, it's something, again, like, as you go through all of this stuff, it's all, it all sounds so ridiculous. And maybe the whole thing is completely ridiculous, like the actual story, once you tie it all together. But when you take all the little bits of it, you know, comet ping pong pizza is run by a guy named James Aliphantus. So, yeah, and I pointed this out on... Your tweet this morning. Is that something else or what?

I mean, like, I don't... I mean, Aliphantis is a Greek name. It's a common Greek name, so it's fine. But, like, the fact that Jeanne Le'Enfants, it's almost spelled the exact same way, and it means I like children or I love children. It's very strange. I don't even know if that's this real name.

If it is, then it's just a huge coincidence. If it's not, then, you know, throw him in jail. And so this guy's a pizza place owner in Washington, D.C., a place called Comet Pingpong Pizza, and he is listed in GQ Magazine as one of the 50 most powerful people in Washington, D.C., which is a little strange. He used to be the boyfriend of David Brock, the founder of Media Matters, back in the day. That was years ago.

And so, as there, people start going through investigating this Comet Pingpong Pizza place. They thought it was weird that Breitbart had had that sort of weird exchange about ping pong. And they start investigating this place a little. And they have musical acts that will come and perform. This is a place that is advertised for children. And so, like, as a place for kids, bring your kids to this place. It's a fun place. Well, they have these acts, these musical acts that come through that are sort of, like the best way I can describe it is that it's sort of a weird surrealist like David Lynch meets pink flamingos kind of aesthetic where it's sort of this trashy but like surrealistic creepy sort of vibe that you get they would

there's videos music videos and promo videos that a couple of these bands have cut that we know were playing there because they were on advertisements and one of them is is called oh gosh what is the one call I know one of them's called sex stains and then there's another one called well the lead singer's called majestic ape i can't remember the name of the band off the top of me it's been a while since i really looked hard into this stuff but you know the one there's they're they're on stage joking about pedophilia they're joking about pedophilia and their songs um and then this other band uh sex stains that's performed there they have a music video that you can go watch on youtube and it takes place this

music video, most of it in like a child's nursery basically. And there's big and large toys and blocks and various things around. And there's this very prominently featured throughout the video is this large block, multicolored block, and on one side of it, the side that's always facing the camera is this symbol that looks basically like a triangular spiral. Like it's a spiral, but in the shape of a triangle, right? And it turns out that there is a released FBI document. Looks like it's maybe like a training document or something that got released. That you can go find this on the internet as well.

It says symbols and logos used by pedophiles to identify sexual preferences. And then it shows several examples. Some of them drawn, some of them on coins or rings or amulets you'd wear around your neck, that are that exact symbol, that triangular spiral thing, that apparently this is one of the ways that pedophiles express their proclivities to one another, like on the down low, I suppose. And so at the end of that music video, the lead singer of the band is kind of, she's got her hands out in like this weird position. I don't know what she's doing, almost some sort of like, anyway, she's reaching out directly. toward this symbol. It's like the only thing really that's prominent in the thing in the

foreground there is the lead singer and this big block with that symbol and she's facing it. And basically, obviously her attention is on it. And that's how the music video ends after this thing has been prominently placed throughout the entire video. And so people think that's very strange. People think it's strange that two doors down from comet ping pong pizza pizza was a place called Besta Pizza and that the logo of that place was a pizza slice which is in the form of a triangle that was done up like a spiral just like that symbol the exact same thing they changed the logo a few weeks after all this stuff started popping up on the internet and the place is closed now I think and so that was all very strange um the guy James aliphantus the owner you know he

people found his Instagram page and the avatar that he used for his Instagram page was a statue of Antonus, who was the teenage boy lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian. On his Instagram page, there were a lot of pictures that and comments that if you just took him out of context are very strange, a child who's like taped to a table and jokes about things that could be interpreted that way. So people think this is all very strange.

especially when they're already listening to what Andrew Breitbart said and they're, you know, they're already kind of three-quarters of the way down the rabbit hole. Well, then somebody discovers an email that involves this, this, it's an invitation from this performance artist called Marina Abramovic, and she has an event called spirit cooking. And everybody's probably heard of this, like at least in name. But for those who haven't, John and Tony Pesed Podesta, his brother, were invited personally by Marina Abramovic to come to this spirit cooking event. And what it is, is it's a dinner that takes place in a multi-roomed art installation. That is just, it's, I mean, if you were to tell somebody that this was some sort of a devil worship, like ritual or something,

I don't think they would change much about it. Like there's white walls, and the walls are covered with really cryptic, weird, creepy messages about drinking fresh breast milk on earthquake nights. A lot of sort of art school, like, Edge Lord bullshit. And it's written in pig's blood up on the walls. In one of the corners, there's an effigy of an infant with a bucket of pig's blood splashed all over it. there's little dolls that are, you know, position like they're copulating. And in the meal, the people who were there to participate in this thing, they drink things that are, they're supposed to pretend, or human blood, or semen or breast milk. In another spirit cooking

event that took place, you could find these pictures on the internet with like Lady Gaga and Gwen Stefani, a lot of other people like this. You know, they're there with like a naked body, a person, a real person lying in a tub of what's supposed to be blood, and they're pretending to be a corpse, and people are eating off of them. A lot of just very weird, strange stuff, right? And so people see, and Abramovic herself, I mean, you can go find, you know, her pictures on the internet, and she's got pictures of herself all in red, holding up a bloody goat's head, another one with a snake around her head and neck and in her mouth.

She was apparently friends with that Brazilian cult leader John of God, who was running a sex slave operation down there. You can kind of forgive her for that, I guess. Oprah and a million other people were apparently good buddies with that guy. So surprise, surprise. But you get to this and people, you know, start asking questions, right? And so people start tying all this stuff together. They say, okay, there are, you know, there's the code word emails that are telling us

that there's something to do with pedophilia going. And then they take it out and they say, okay, now there's this pizza place involved. And this guy's connected to a bunch of other people. And so now it's this sort of sprawling pedophile ring. And then they discover the spirit cooking thing. And they say, okay, this is actually a ritualistic, satanic elite pedophile ring. And that's kind of where you get to at this point. It got really fun when people started looking into John Podesta's brother, Tony Podesta.

So Tony Podesta and John Podesta. You know, Podesta's both of these guys, like they're those, you know, there's like a whole class of these people who never run for office. They never run a government agency or anything like that. But they just always seem to be around somehow. You know, they're always there whenever. You mean like guys who own pizza shops and get, or like on the top 50 most powerful. Right. Exactly. And so John Podesta was friends with Bill.

Clinton going back to the early 70s, they worked for the same senator together, and he remained in that circle. And in 1988, he and his brother Tony, right as Bill Clinton is kind of deciding he's going to run for president, John and his brother Tony Podesta start the Podesta group, which up until it closed a few years ago, right after Hillary Clinton lost the presidency, was certainly one of maybe the most powerful Democrat side lobbying firm in Washington. very, very connected because these are people who were connected to the Clinton kind of operation very, very closely. And, you know, that's been running the show for a long time on the Democrat side. And so they started that up in 1988, and then John Podesta stepped away in 1992 to go work for

Bill Clinton. And he worked for him throughout his presidency, eventually got to be his chief of staff, gets done with the Clinton administration. And in, I think, 2003, he started the Center for American progress and then 2016 he's running Hillary Clinton's campaign so he's he's just very involved in that whole circle and this whole time his brother Tony now is running the lobbying group by himself because you know I think you have to do it that way for conflicts of interest reasons but they still work closely together obviously and you know it's it's a everybody kind of knows what's going on right and so it turns out that Tony Podesta is a big art collector and in 2014

There was a profile of his house in a Washington Society magazine called Washington Life. And they profile his house and some of his art. He's a well-known art collector. I mean, a very, very big, like, multi-million dollar, you know, pieces of art kind of thing. And they profile some of the stuff he's got in his house. The first thing that you notice is, or that people noticed, was the giant statue. It's like a golden colored, like bronze. statue all shined up that is a human, a headless human, basically in a full backward arch.

And it's called the Arch of Hysteria. And it's by an artist called Louise Bouchois. And people, I don't know who found this, it wasn't me, but somebody pointed out that there's a picture that is a public of the aftermath of one of the serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer's victims and he took a picture of it because he would play with the corpses and do various things sometimes and take pictures of him where he had the corpse in pretty much the exact same position that this statue is depicting and this statue she did this a year after all the dommer stuff became public now louise bourgeois apparently there are sketches and books going back a long time ago where she was drawing this thing so like that's probably not where the concept came from

but when people noticed that, obviously, it continued to throw jet fuel on this fire. Well, then people started to look at some of the paintings he had on his walls. And these, you can't really explain a way like that. Oh, I should mention, by the way, Louise Bourgeois, she's also got, like, there are sketches and drawings that have been made public that are, that show the two of them in particular,

where it's like a page or a canvas with a line drawn down the middle of it. and a little boy and a full-grown man with father and son written beneath them, kind of holding on to the middle line, like it's a pole or reaching out toward each other or something, and they both have erections. And so that's a little strange, right? Not everybody draws stuff like that in their spare time. And so people started looking at the paintings on his walls. And these are pictures that are in the magazine profile, right?

So these are things that he, I mean, if I had an art collection with a bunch of pictures of what we're about to talk about, I would probably take those down before company came over. I would certainly take them down before the photographers showed up to profile my house in a society magazine. But apparently that's not something he felt was really necessary. And so there are a couple paintings by this artist named Billiana Gerjevik or Gerjevik. I'm not sure. She's a Serbian artist.

and the one you see in his living room, and I'm looking at it right now, he's got a big white couch, a nice rich man in D.C.'s living room. And in the background, there's this painting, and you can make it out pretty clearly, and the full resolution version of this painting is available online.

You can just Google it. Bill Yana, Gherjavik, you'll find all this stuff. And it's a little girl with a sort of weird, deformed-looking face in black sort of almost dead eyes, sitting on a stool with a short skirt up against like what looks like a tile bathroom wall or something like that. And that's one of them. It's like, okay, it's a little creepy and weird

and not something I would have on my wall, but okay, whatever. Well, then there's another picture of another room, kind of a sitting room with an orange couch and a yellow chair and a blue chair. And there are two more of this artist's paintings from this same series. One of them is this huge painting that's about maybe looks like it's about five or six feet tall by eight or ten feet wide, it dominates the room. And it's another one that you can find online. And what it depicts, it's called synchronized swimming. And it's got a bunch of young girls dressed in different ways, laying in a circle on the

bottom of an empty swimming pool. And they've got that same sort of dead look in their eyes. They look like corpses, most of them. And that's the giant painting that he's got dominating this room and this other walls, a bunch of young girls that look dead lying on the bottom of a swimming pool. Well, kitty corner to that is another one of these paintings. This one's about poster size from the same series. And this one is unmistakably two young girls lying dead in a pool or a pond,

rather a pond or river or something like that. And they're laying on their backs just looking up at the camera. and their corpses. Like there's really no question about it. And so this same artist has done a bunch of others that weren't on Tony Podesta's walls in these pictures of this same series. A lot of them with the tile backgrounds.

One of them is a little girl in a striped white and yellow shirt in her panties up against the wall and it's like picturing her from behind. There's another one with a little boy in just his underwear who's bound and tied up hanging against a tile wall. There's another one with a little girl who's lying dead in a pond. Another one with a girl with sort of a deformed face holding a dead baby.

And so this is, you know, the artist, Billiana Georgovic, she's been interviewed before in an art magazine. And she said herself that things that she had read about peddivoccurra. were inspirations for this series of artwork. And so that that's certainly the association that's being made here. And it's very obvious in a lot of these things that it's depicting abuse of children. That's really what the theme is of all of these. One of my buddies after I put that podcast down, pointed out to me, he's a guy who he worked in a slaughterhouse for many, many years. And I kind of looked at all the tile backgrounds on these things. And

I figured there was like a shower kind of swimming pool type thing. He pointed out that that's how all slaughterhouses pretty much look on the inside. And he sent me a ton of pictures. And sure enough, it's just tiled walls, tiled everything. And then I realized that one of the other paintings that Georgievic has as part of this series is three or four butchers wearing hoods over their head with the butcher's long gloves, gloves and like high boots and butcher's aprons and they're all standing around in one of those tiled rooms and so it seems like she probably made that connection too and what we're looking at in some

of these paintings is a bunch of kids in really you know again like creepy abuse oriented pictures in slaughter in a slaughter house and so it seems like what we're probably looking at maybe maybe not in a people found an interview with Tony Podesta and he was being asked about some of his other favorite artists and he listed a sculptor named Patricia Pichanini as one of his very favorite artists and I don't know it's like a sculpture like she does you know the plastic arts of one kind or another basically she makes these statues that look like concept art for like a surrealist

horror movie um basically most of them are they the vast majority of involved children um with monsters or demons of one kind or another leering at them over like leering over them as they sleep in their beds um there's one with this creepy monster with its long claws around standing on a bed with this what looks like maybe a four-year-old girl with its claws around her um you know a lot of there's a lot of imagery uh uh of uh like orifices that look like vaginas or anuses or mouths with things coming out of them and kids poking at them or playing with them. There's a weird one of a deformed child on top of like a horned goat. There's another one where there's this weird kind of pig monster with big puscioles coming off of its back with more monsters coming out of those.

And it's behind this child spooning him in bed. And so that's like, again, there's another one where there's a child trapped in a big spider's nest with a bunch of eggs that are about that. So just creepy, weird stuff involving kids, right? And this is somebody that Tony Podesta listed as one of his very favorite, very favorite artists. Well, then in another interview, he was asked the same question. And this is where, you know, you just start to wonder kind of what's going on here. Another one of his favorite artists that he mentioned, and I'm sure he's got a lot of favorite artists, but when he was asked the question, these are the ones he thought of.

And so that's probably relevant. Is this woman named Kim Noble, who's a British woman who spent most of her life in institutions, like asylums, she's schizophrenic and has dissociative identity disorder, multiple personality disorder. And several of her multiple personalities are artists, and I'll put that in quotes, because um so kim noble was repeatedly viciously violently sexually abused for at least two years between the ages of one and three years old and the damage that that did to her mind is again on display she spent her entire life in institutions and the content of her paintings are not something that you know she's innocent of this She should not be held accountable.

This is a woman who's sick, obviously. But these drawings, these paintings that she does, they're sort of scratched out stick figure kind of paintings, but everything's very clear in all of them exactly what's going on. It all depicts extreme violent sexual abuse of children by multiple adults in many of these things. There's kids tied to chairs with adults, with whips standing over them, while another child's on its knees covering its ears.

There's another one with a little girl with adults surrounding her blindfolded, and it looks like her spirits kind of lifting up and leaving her body. There's another one with kids hanging and then standing in line in front of this adult who is sitting on a chair with a big smile on his face, and he's got his hands down forcing the child to give him oral sex. You can look all these up on the internet. that they're hard to look at, especially when you know the history

where they're coming from. There's another one where, I mean, there's just a bunch of adults standing around a bed and there's a child laying on it and there's an adult crouched down on top of the child having sex with the child. There's ones where there's a bunch of adults standing around with children on their knees in front of them

and they're urinating in the kid's mouths. This is one of the artists that Tony Podesta listed as one of his very favorite artists. when you think about okay all this is sick but what we're really talking about here is a woman who had all of this stuff done to her for years when she was a small child whose mind was shattered by that experience and who now depicts this stuff you know just sort of again like she's not responsible for the content of these things and the idea of some some guy like tony pedesta sitting around with a bunch of his, you know, art friends over a thousand dollar bottle of wine,

looking at, you know, oh, look at the use of color in this Kim Noble piece where the man is whipping and raping the child. It's just really sick. And it gets to the question that I, that I, this is the direction I took that third podcast is when you go through all this stuff and you lay it all out there, you can kind of understand why people had the response of what the hell is going on here. Whether or not you take that and tie it all together into there's this giant conspiracy involving a pizza place and, you know, everything, everybody's connected and everybody's involved, you know, you don't have to do that. Like the thing, the direction I took the podcast and the thing that just occupies my mind is, well, you know, I think about like one of the

questions that is very strange to people like me, to people like you to people out there listening, anybody out there listening, is how somebody like Jeffrey Epstein could have operated out in the open for as long as he did in these circles. I mean, you got to remember, his private airplane was called the Lolita Express, and he didn't give it that name. Like other people gave it that name. You know, Lolita, for everybody who hasn't read it, and I don't really recommend it, but this is what literary people consider high art. It's a 1955 novel based on an event that happened in 1948 where this man, this middle-aged man kidnapped, this 12-year-old girl, kept her for about two years on this cross-country trip, and just raped

her all the time. And that's what this book is about. And it portrays it in a way that, like, you know, maybe they're in love. It's really, it's really sick. I don't like the book. You know what's interesting is the book did come out in 1955, but Nabokov, the author, some of his early writings are some of the books that the National Socialists burned. Yeah. Yeah, that's not surprising. That's not surprising at all. You're not supposed to mention which books they were burning.

Come on. Yeah. You know better than that. I did a whole episode on that. And then I guess I spent it from YouTube for questioning the election results from two years ago. Yeah. Yeah, and that's so, you know, so again, coming back to that question, how is it that if people knew what Jeffrey Epstein was up to and they did, people knew exactly what he was up to. There's no question about that. I mean, people knew that he had been convicted for child prostitution, whatever that means, back in the early 2000s or mid-2000s. Everybody knew that. Everybody who knew who Jeffrey Epstein was, knew that, put it that way. You know, they gave him, they, they, they, they, Other people nicknamed his airplane the Lodita Express.

They knew what was going on on those airplanes. And so how is it possible that this guy could just operate like that, especially in a place like Washington where, you know, people are looking for anything they can find to smear somebody and destroy their career. If there's any little thing they can take out of context, they'll do it. But nobody seems to be interested in saying, hey, why does Tony Podesta have pictures of dead kids on his walls by artists who specialize in pedophile art,

it just doesn't get mentioned. And in fact, he feels comfortable enough with all of that that he leaves it up when people come over for parties. He leaves it up when photographers show up from a magazine to profile his house because this is normal in this place. Like, this is what's normal.

And so we ask, how is it that Jeffrey Epstein could operate out in the open? It's because we're thinking like normal people. You know, we're thinking that if I walk on to a dude's private plane and there are a half dozen teenage girls that are not related to him running around the plane and he asked me if I want to get a massage from one of them like I'm certainly leaving the plane the only question is whether I would get violent before I did that and I think that's how most people would respond and so they think how is it that he could have operated out in the open like this

well if you just came from a party at Tony Podesta's house where he's showing off his Kim noble drawings. And, you know, after that, you went and had dinner at a Marina Abramovic thing with pig's blood written all over the walls and everything like that. Then you show up to Jeffrey Epstein's plane and it's not that weird. You know, it's pretty just par for the course, basically, among these degenerates. And so if these were people who, you know, it was a guy who lived down the block. It was just somebody who, you know, he's into weird stuff. You know, some people like to listen to heavy metal music about the devil too. Does that make them devil worshippers?

No. But if this was a guy down the block, first of all, I don't think anybody would let their kids hang out at that house. But maybe, you know, whatever. We interpret the First Amendment pretty broadly when it comes to filth in America. And so whatever.

Maybe the cops shouldn't be sent to arrest him. Don't put me in charge if you don't want that to happen. but in the current setup, maybe that shouldn't be the case. But we're talking about people who are right at the center of the American power structure. And we are completely within our rights to demand to know. I mean, you would get kicked off of a local school board for having pictures of dead abused kids on your wall. And yet these people are at the center of the Washington power structure. And it's, you know, so you ask yourself like,

what is it that's going on there that this stuff could be could be accepted the way it is you remember what happened i don't know all the details on this i don't keep up with like just day-to-day politics that much but i noticed that uh when that guy madison cauthorn came out and said that he'd been uh offered to you know since he became a congressman people had come to him and invited him to orgies and uh you know cocaine parties with orgies and everything and man they got rid of him quick in that that took no time at all they got rid of of him. Well, let me, let me bring this up. The former Republican Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, went to jail for pedophilia. Yeah. And the Democrats don't bring that up every day.

Isn't that weird? Yeah. Like, they still hammer the Republicans over Richard Nixon. But that, yeah, that's fine. That's not worth me. I said that to somebody on, on Twitter who was like, you know, oh, Matt Gates and underage, you know, because, you're just playing, they're playing left, right politics. I'm like, do you find it weird that the former House Speaker, when the Republican House Speaker went to jail for pedophilia? And Democrats don't bring it up. And she, well, and this person's like, well, I bring it up. I'm like, how come your, the politicians you like don't mention it at every turn? Why isn't that a major talking? point.

Yeah, why don't all of the major, you know, every time anybody posts anything about the Epstein story, you know, my podcast that I put out on that story, I mean, I don't know if they're like my top downloaded podcast, but they're definitely up there. Everything that gets put out there goes viral. I mean, you have that leaked video from ABC News that James, what's his name, put out, the guy who does like the hidden camera videos of all of James O'Keefe you had that video that he got a hold of and that thing went crazy viral everybody wanted to see it everybody wanted to hear it and so you would think you know because they say that that the media is run by you know the rule

is like if it bleeds it leads right so if it's just sensational and whatever gets eyeballsed and that's what they'll go after if that were true every single media organization would have an entire department devoted to Jeffrey Epstein because people all want to know about that. And they refuse to address it for probably the same reason that people just avoid and stay away from the Denny Hastert story. Denny Hastert, by the way, was at a kid's summer camp with John Podesta back in 67 or 68, I think. It was in Japan. It's kind of a weird thing. I don't know if that's a, you know, we'll bring it up, but that is interesting. And so, yeah, I mean, you know, you start to ask what these people are, just what it is they're doing when they're not on camera and and who these people really are.

And, you know, there was a, there was a New York Times. Well, a lot of people wrote about it. But there was this, there was this French novelist back in maybe 2014 or 2015 named Gabriel Matznev, who, you wrote novels that, were about pedophilia and they were not about like a cop who's chasing down a pedophile. They were, you know, a book written by a pedophile, it turns out, based on his own experiences for other people who found that kind of stuff interesting. Well, Matt Seneff was not, he was a, this is a, this guy's a big deal. I mean, he had a, he had a column in a major French newspaper or magazine, rather. He was friends with, you know, Francois Hollande, a lot of high up French people. He was a French high

society, very, very big guy over there. And finally he gets busted for being a pedophile his entire life. You know, his first book that he ever wrote was called Under 16 years old. And it was about pedophilia. So it was all out in the open and everybody kind of knew about this. Well, finally they arrested him. And there was this New York Times article kind of about the whole situation. And it said something very, very, very interesting that I think maybe shines a fair amount of light on a lot of this stuff. It said that, you know, in France, there's always been this tension between its professed egalitarianism and the elitism of the people on top, and that the elites in France have, for many years, distinguished themselves from ordinary people through a different

code of morality. That it was a status thing, that it was one of the way that it was one of the way, that they mark themselves off, that they're above all of, you know, beyond good and evil, above all of those provincial kind of considerations. And I think that that probably shines a lot of light on, you know, why it is that,

because just think about it. Like, how many of these people are there? That how many people out there would think it's normal or would want a picture of a painting of dead kids lying on the bottom of a swimming pool prominently featured, very expensive piece of art, like prominently featured in their living room.

And the answer is very, very few, right? It's, it's, and yet, when you go to Washington, D.C., when you go to a lot of these circles, there doesn't seem to be a very few of these people. They seem to be very, very, they seem to be all over the place. Think about Jimmy Seville in England. Everyone knew. Everybody knew.

I think there's in. an interview of John Leiden in like 1977 where he mentioned he says something. Yeah. I mean, that's and it's like people knew that this. Yeah, there was a, there was a police officer, a British police officer who talked about something that happened to him back in Jimmy Saville's heyday, where he came upon Jimmy Saville in a car with a 15-year-old girl. And he just let it slide.

You let it pass. And the guy says basically, he's like, look, I know this sounds absolutely horrible. And this is not going to please anybody today. But this was normal back then. Like this was normal among like these type of people. There was another BBC presenter that wrote an article during the Me Too stuff where he said that, you know, these days he and a lot of people that he knows lose sleep at night and have nightmares that one day the cops are going to knock on their door for a lot of the things that they were up to. back in the 60s and 70s, that, you know, especially that period after the cultural revolution in the 60s and after the pill, but before AIDS, you know, you hear about it, whether it's

music bands, Hollywood, political circles, TV, these people were out of control in the 1970s. I mean, it's, you hear about bands like Led Zepp, a lot of, a lot of bands, a lot of Hollywood parties where it was just totally normal to have teenage girls and teenage boys running around. I mean, it's even like, you know, even that. Steven Tyler, Stephen Tyler convinced some family a couple to like take his, what, what, their 13, 14 year old daughter on tour with him. Yeah. Like. And, yeah.

The police wrote the song. Have you ever, have you ever listened to the lyrics of Don't Stand so close to me by the police? No. Maybe I should. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, listen to that. I sang it to, I sang it to someone once, and I was, and I was like, if you ever listen to these lyrics and they're just like, I mean, Sting mentions Nabokoff in it.

I think he's like, and so, and so, you know, you're talking about a class of people from whom this kind of thing is considered normal, you know, normal enough that nobody, you know, nobody in Washington, D.C., the most cutthroat city in the entire country, bothers to take a shot at Tony Podesta over having this stuff. It's just totally normal. And then you couple in the fact that you can't get the media to talk about any of, I mean, even just, again, the very obvious questions that really need to be answered. Why did Alex Acosta say Jeffrey Epstein belong to intelligence?

We just, by any standard of national security classification, I don't care what the excuse, Everybody wants and deserves an answer to that question, at least. You can't even get the question asked. And, you know, it just, it leaves room for, you know, the kind of conspiracy theories that would lead to a guy grabbing a gun and going down to a pizza place in Washington, D.C. Because when you see all of this stuff and you say, like, clearly there's something strange going on in all this. And so you say, well, okay, I'll turn on the news and they'll tell me, like, you know, they'll ask the questions about it. And you find that not only is that not

happening, but anybody who mentions it, you know, it's died down a little bit now. But if you mentioned this stuff back, you know, when Ben Swan got kicked off, you would get kicked off of like all your platforms for bringing this stuff up, for asking obvious questions that any normal person would want answered of people who are at the center of the American. power structure. And so, you know, that you're just, you're begging for, uh, you know, people to draw their own conclusions and take matters into their own hands when that's the situation. I mean, these people for a million different reasons belong nowhere near power. Uh, but, you know, I think this is one of the angles that you can really, you can take this to

anybody. You can take this to a Democrat mom, you know, a Democrat soccer mom. And, show her a lot of this stuff, and she will agree with you that these people belong nowhere near the decision-making process on whether or not we should be doing sex change surgeries on children. You know, like if you have pictures of dead, tied up, abused eight-year-olds on your wall, you shouldn't be helping make decisions as to whether eight-year-olds should be able to get gender reassignment surgeries. Most people could agree with that. Well, think about how obsessed with these quino-whoi elites are.

with Ukraine. And all you have to do is go searching back a few years, and you'll find articles about how Ukraine is the actual, not human trafficking like they talk about in this country. If someone becomes a prostitudo, that's human trafficking. No, like literally, Ukrainian girls go into Kiev, going to big cities, and being kidnapped and taken to other countries to be sex slaves. Ukraine is like the center of that. I mean, one of my, one of my Patreon supporters said, Ukraine, it almost seems like it's Westworld for Western elites.

You know, where, why do they want to spend so much time over there? Yeah. You know, what, you know, what's what? Well, that's what Russia was supposed to be, too. And it's what it was in the 90s, you know. Ukraine is basically what Russia would have been if Putin had never come along and regulated the oligarchs and sent them packing. to London, New York, and Tel Aviv, you know? There's that famous story, and right after Putin took power,

where he ordered a bunch of the most powerful oligarchs all out to this dacha, and he sits him down at a table. There's guys with guns around and everything. He's got the full godfather, like, set up, and he brings them all in, sits them around the table, and he just informs them, look, you guys can stay billionaires, you can stay rich. Like, I'm not going to interfere with that,

but you guys are done having anything to do with the Russian state. The Russian state is back and it's going to be reasserting its prerogatives. Those of you can get on board with that. Great. If you can't, then you and I are going to have problems. And some of them could, you know, guys like Oleg Deripaska, a lot of the ethnic Russian oligarchs, they were kind of on board with that. Because, you know, these were guys to, it's natural to have a certain amount of love for

your country. They didn't like exactly what was going on. And so they were happy to get on board with that. you know, some of them fled to New York, London, and Tel Aviv with hundreds of billions of dollars that they've since used buying off politicians and paying for media time and paying off think tanks to make sure that the Anglo-Sphere stays in a permanent jihad with Russia. And, you know, they were very disappointed. They thought that they were going to be able to loot that in whole country forever.

And they were able to do it throughout the entire 1990s. and Putin, you know, I mean, people, you don't have to be a Putin lover or whatever. I mean, you know, whether or not I would want to live in a country that's governed the way Russia's governed is really beside the point. Because I'm not coming from a country that was in the state Russia was in the 1990s. And, you know, if you think that you're going to go from that to Bernie Sanders runs for office in Russia and then turns it into Vermont, like from what it was in the 90s, that's just not how it works. And I mean, you had you had oligarchs that controlled major chunks of the country, including the natural resources and including the local governments that refused to send taxes to the central government who had private military forces that were better equipped and better paid than the Russian army. And so, you know, if you were to say, how is the Russian state ever going to recollect itself and just reestablish itself as a going concern, you said, well, there's going to be a massive civil war, first of all. and then someone's going to come out on top.

But that didn't happen. And that's amazing that that did not happen, given where they were coming from. And, you know, I don't think, again, people can like or dislike Putin for a million different reasons. But there's very few people who could have pulled that off. And I think the Russians know that. And that's why he's so popular. Well, yeah, well, you don't want to talk about that. I mean, I'm almost convinced if you say anything positive about Putin, now you can get videos pulled.

Yeah, I think so too. And I think honestly, like, I think if this war really escalates, like, if it does get to a point where, you know, a tactical nuke is used or if it just, if it continues to grow, if we get, I think we'll be in full like Woodrow Wilson, espionage act territory. And I'm very cognizant of that whenever I criticize our policy on the war. But whatever, you know, I just, I can't. And let's not discount the fact that if a nuke, if a tactical nuke goes off in. Ukraine somewhere. There's a country in the world that has nukes that, but they don't have nukes. We're not allowed to talk about their nukes.

Does anybody keeping counts of how many nukes they have? Very easy for one to just disappear. And you have a nice false flag that would put the United States into a hot war with Russia. Yeah, you know, I was in, I was at a conference a couple weeks ago in Austin. And there were a whole bunch of different people there giving. presentations and on panels. I was on a panel. And one of the people who was there was Eric Prince. That's another thing I didn't mention is back in 2016, Eric Prince gave an interview to Breitbart, I think it was, a radio interview. And he said that he had sources at one police plaza in New York,

NYPD headquarters, high, high, well-placed sources, and I believe him, he seems like the kind of guy who probably would have those sources, who told him that they had gone through the fine-toothed comb, Anthony Wiener's laptop. And again, Anthony Wiener wasn't just a prominent congressman. He was married to Huma Abidine, who was Hillary Clinton's good friend, I guess. We'll just leave it at that. And if they had gone through this, this is Eric Prince. This is the guy who started Blackwater, a guy who's very, very connected. I mean, his sister ended up being the education secretary for Trump, right? Very connected guy. And he goes on the radio and says that he's got high-place sources at one police plaza that told him, they went through the Wiener laptop and they found chaos. They

evidence of child sexual abuse, money laundering, all of this stuff, and that they had sent it to the FBI. And when nothing happened, that the NYPD was actually started threatening, if you don't do something about this, then we're going to go public. But then that the Obama administration, the Department of Justice, started threatening New York, that we're going to prosecute a bunch of people over the Eric Garner case if you do that. And so they didn't. And so Eric Prince was giving a presentation. or having a talk with a guy.

And then there were questions and answers afterwards. And, you know, I had to get in there. So I got up there. I was like, I've been waiting six years to get an answer to this question. And I laid it out to him. And I said, you know, you said, and I quoted him exactly what he said. I was like, this was in 2016. I know it's a little off topic.

I don't know about anybody else in here. But I, for one, would love an update on this. And he didn't disavout any of it. He said he stayed by all of it. He said it was true. And so then I asked him, I said, and this goes to what you were just talking about with Russia, kind of is how I'm relating this is, I said, okay, so you were just up here, though, telling us how, you know, we need to stand with the people of Iran.

We need to, you know, back the people like the freedom fighters in Ukraine or whatever. It's like, you're just, you're telling me in my answer here that a bunch of the most powerful people up in Washington are either complicit or actively participating in child sexual abuse and money laundering and all these things. And you want me to follow those people into a conflict with Russia or Iran or anything. He said, how do you square those two things? And he just, he kind of just avoided the question. You know, I mean, he seemed like actually kind of a pretty normal, like good head on

his shoulders kind of guy, but a very boomer mentality in terms of like, just can't get past, you know, like he told us a story. Like when he was seven years old, his family took him. they went to France on a vacation and they went to Normandy Beach and he was already like so into World War II and everything that he was actually given his family at seven years old given them a tour of like Normandy Beach right so he's just one of those guys team America kind of thing and you understand it but I think even I think people like him are even having a little bit of trouble with the cognitive dissonance there because I'm not following those people anywhere I mean

putting all of this moral stuff aside, I mean, it just blows me away that people don't seem to remember that the people who are managing this conflict with Russia are the same people who manage the Afghanistan withdrawal, like the exact same people. And everybody seems fine with that. I mean, it's really like it's late stage civilization like type behavior. They spent five years calling everything fake news. And now when it comes to Ukraine, and I think it's just one of those things. It's that boomer truth regime bullshit of where, well, if we respect the military and the people in the military and the people in the military, they have our best interests at heart. We'll always respect.

It's like the people in the Pentagon have your best interests. The people of the CIA have the NSA, the people, the, the NSA, these people, you know, basically. Basically, the deep state, you know, I mean, these are still boomers who think that the deep state are Obama holdovers. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so, and then, so, you know, you celebrate all these people who finally realizing that the press, you know, isn't biased. It actually has an agenda. And all of a sudden, military, something. Yeah.

I mean, here's the thing that pisses me off the most is it's that, it's the whole, like, wig theory of history thing. How could another country being, how could another country invade another country? What? It's like, this has been, this is the default of humanity. This is, if this isn't happening. And that's if you just look at American history for the last 20 years. Like people will say that with a straight face. Obama was like being interviewed back in 2014 after the Crimea thing.

And he just said with totally straight face that like, you know, Russia and Vladimir Putin are just going to have to learn that, you know, civilized countries don't just go around invading other countries. It's like, it's crazy. Like it really is, you think you're going insane listening to these people sometimes. I mean, you know, that specifically the way I asked Prince that question was, you know, because he had said a few things. He seems like sort of maybe like an evangelical like Normie Protestant type. I'm not sure, but that's what he kind of sounded like. You mentioned religion, Christianity a few times in his talk.

And I asked him why we should follow. the kind of people that he was describing in that Breitbart interview, into a war against a country that is using government funds to build hundreds of Orthodox churches all over Russia. Like, why should I want to go join these people to go fight them? And he didn't have a good answer for me. I mean, I don't think there is a good answer. You know, like, and I will say this, that it is,

there's been a lot of progress made. Like, those boomers, a lot of them kind of fell in line as far as Russia. and the Ukraine story and everything, but not quite. It's a little less than it would have been, say, pre-Trump. Thank God for Tucker Carlson. I mean, I can tell you, Tucker Carlson is, you know, he's a guy who, like, I know him a little bit, and he's a guy who is very obviously, like, he's been just up here for so long that he's not quite normal, you know, like nobody could really be normal when you're that famous for that long.

but I can tell you that his politics are legit and his intentions are legit and thank God for him I mean the people at Fox News and I've heard this from journalists who work with Fox News that the management at Fox News they hate Tucker's guts and they would get rid of him tomorrow if they could

and that to me just is that recommends him better than just about anything so but if it wasn't for him you know if they had been able to get rid of him and you just had Hannity and whoever they replaced him with, then you'd have Fox News, and it would be just all pro-Ukraine, kill the Russians. And, you know, so he provides that little wedge.

And, you know, to the extent that I have any audience or influence at all, I just decided early on, I'm not going along with this. I just, I don't care how big it gets or what goes on. You know, I wasn't going to ever get behind. I mean, you look at what happened in Syria. There's a lot of people I know that the Syrian war, because again, I came from a, family of veterans. I served 20 years for the Department of Defense. It's in my nature to just be reflexively patriotic and reflexively nationalist and all that. And the Syrian war, I mean,

we just have to be very direct about what happened there. I mean, we ginned up an international jihad to go destroy a country that all of the Christians and other minorities in that country were hiding behind Assad's forces. He was the only thing protecting them. They were going to get completely wiped out by these animals that we sent in there. I mean, they did wipe out everybody they could get their hands on. They were on the outskirts of Damascus when the Russians and the Iranians showed up. And the Russians showed up and stopped a genocide against Christians that we were perpetrating.

And I know a lot of people that the Syrian war, it really kind of like broke their faith. You know, it made it very hard to, you know, yeah, I just, I will not support this jihad against Russia. I don't care what happens if they want to, you know, throw me in jail. If things get bad enough, then they can do it. But I'm not cucking on that issue. I just refuse. Yeah. And it seems like they want to, I interviewed Ben Abelow, who he just wrote a really short little book,

20,000 words on, you know, how the West brought war to the Ukraine. And there are quotes in there from people in the State Department who are just like, we will fight until the very last Ukrainian. It's like, yeah, these people don't care about Ukrainians, man. And you know what? The Ukrainian government doesn't care about Ukrainians. And when you think about the fact, and this is kind of one of those areas that you talk about, it's very hard to talk about. without getting in trouble and without having a bunch of people just take the bits that you're giving them and then just running completely off the rails with them. But still, like, one of the things I've been concerned about from the very beginning is that, you know, that Zelensky is a Jewish guy in Ukraine who just learned the Ukrainian language like seven years ago. his defense minister is Jewish, his prime minister is Jewish, his campaign was funded and run by a Jewish oligarchy, Ihor Kolomoisky.

And, you know, now I'm not like conspiracy theorizing here. What I'm worried about, what I still worry about, is like, I don't, like, Ukraine is not a, is not known as a traditionally, like, pro-Jewish country, you know. Obviously, like they got a lot of these OUN, like, neo-Nazi militia types. the Azov guys and all this, you think that this government under Zelensky, they don't care at all about throwing these neo-Nazis into the fire forever, you know? I mean, I imagine, I would imagine that probably growing up as a Jewish kid in Ukraine probably wasn't always easy for Zelensky. You know, I'm sure there were times where that wasn't easy. And so I just, I worry and wonder that, you know, they've got a guy in office over there who will just throw the Ukrainians into the fire

until they're all gone because he just doesn't really care, you know, because these people have been hostile to him and hostile to his people. I could be wrong about that. Maybe he's become a Ukrainian nationalist, like all the Azov guys, like over the years. But, you know, it's something to be concerned about, I think. What do they call Ukraine? The breadbasket of Europe? Yeah. It's very rich land, a lot of resources. a lot more resources than a little stretch of land in the Middle East, it would seem like there would be some people might be interested in taking that land over. And, you know, because it's a little more rich and probably a little more stable than, you know, where they are.

All I know, yeah, all I know is that it would be terrible for the world. and I think it would be terrible for America and Americans if the regime gets its way in Ukraine. I think that it would be a disaster for the world, actually. And I think that the best thing that could happen, including with two America and two Americans, is that the Russians get their way in Ukraine. And that we have to take a step back

from this global American empire that, you know, we're we're I mean if you look at places like Russia and Turkey and Israel to a degree and Saudi Arabia to a degree India China you know basically these sort of civilization states they all have an interest in a multipolar world order we are the only ones that don't and that and that goes for the Europeans as well I mean we see what's going on over there the Europeans are the Europeans are done man like their economy is i saw this thing the other day about a morganthau plan 2.0 yeah there you go i mean and it's a in there and yet they're it's a DIY morgan thou plan right getting them to do it to themselves and you know i mean that's i don't blame the european people for being that stupid obviously i think their leaders are compromised nato is not so much a military alliance as much as it's just the euphemism we give to the American domination of Europe. So yeah, it's, I think that taking a, getting a bloody nose on this and getting pushed back and finding out that, in fact,

other major powers do have spheres of influence and you don't run the world. It would be the best thing it could happen to us and certainly the rest of the world. Yeah. Sometimes getting punched in the mouth is very beneficial. I think that the world would be, the United States would definitely maybe a much different place. If a lot of the men who've become adults in the last 20 years, have been punched in the mouth a bunch as a kid. Yeah. That's a child.

You know, I have a cousin who, you know, he's always kind of a mama's boy, very soft, couldn't really, and it translated over into just how he kind of lived his life, couldn't really, like, get motivated to do anything. One day he's like 20, 21. 22. He was in a restaurant waiting in line with his girlfriend. And there were these gangbangers there who like started making remarks to his girlfriend. He felt like he had to say something. They just kicked his ass. And, you know, really gave him a pretty solid beating these guys. It was the best thing that ever happened to him. I mean, he became a man that day. And then he just,

he went out and he, you know, finished college. He's a teacher now. He's a very successful guy. and he really like matured about 10 years in 15 minutes during that beating so yeah definitely right about that all right well let's get out of here um yeah sorry i rambled so much i don't know if we covered i want to cover i i think we covered enough remind everybody where they can find your work um the podcast is called martyr made all one word, martyr as in Alahu Akbar made. My other podcast with Jocko is called Unraveling. You can find those both anywhere that you get podcasts or on the Martyr Made website.

And then I got a substack, martyrmade. Dot substack.com. And yeah, that's it. I appreciate it, Daryl. Thank you. And let's do this again soon. Yeah, anytime, Pete. Thanks, man.

Thank you. Take care. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Kinyano show. returning to the show. I've been waiting for this. Gerald Cooper. How you don't know? Good, man.

How are you? It's great to be back on. Thank you. Thank you. Last time you were on, we did a, we talked about the ridiculousness of Pizza Gate and how that was, just totally ridiculous. Yeah, totally ridiculous.

Nothing there. But this one, this one, this is a, was it five parts? You've written? I think it was five or six. was supposed to be one, and then I decided it was going to be two, and then it turned it into five or six, which is what always happens with my project. So, yeah. And it was very simply titled. I remember getting the emails and it said Jews and blacks. And I assume that's in America because, you know, that was my immediate assumption. And I started reading. And I wanted to have you

on so that you're doing this on your substack. Substack is an unbelievable platform. They've been really good to me and good to a lot of people who believe in, you know, should be able to say what you want and not have to suffer the consequences of the regime and their apparatchiks. But this is something that with my recent reading of race war in high school, which a lot of people wouldn't, maybe they would see the black-white conflict in it, but the fact that the New York City Teachers Union, the UFT at the time had 60,000 members and 40,000 of them were Jewish, I look at that and I'm trying to also look at the historic relationship between the black and the Jew in this country.

And you just started writing about it. So I want to give you a chance to do an overview. So where do you want to start? You know, the reason I started writing that series is the Kanye stuff. was in the news. And I knew a little bit about the history of black Jewish relations in the 20th century. And, you know, I kind of realized that when the Kanye thing came out, and it kind of happens every time, you know, when the Nick Cannon thing happened or when Jay-Z got in trouble. Each time this happens, people tend to just put it in a jar and, you know, put it up by itself on display somewhere.

as like this ignorant rapper who made this ignorant remark, you know. But when you look back at how often this has happened over the years and how often it happens specifically with black celebrities and not white celebrities, you know, it took a bottle of Jim Beam and sleep deprivation for Mel Gibson to go on his rant, you know. But that you realize that there's a long history here. And that this doesn't just come out of nowhere, it didn't erupt out of nowhere. And it's just, you know, these ideas that Kanye's putting out about blacks being the real Hebrews or, you know, Jewish executives and business owners taking advantage of black labor or black customers or, you know, any of these things that he says. He's not going online and, you know, to some hardcore right-wing website reading these things.

These are ideas that have been circulating in the black community for many decades. And, you know, so I wanted to give people just a little history lesson on the background of what happened when Kanye was having his self-immolation on the steps of the ADL headquarters. But it ended up being like a much longer history of black Jewish relations in the U.S. You know, kind of started back with the Great Migration up through the teacher strike, which I'm sure we'll talk about. And then all the way on up through like the Crown Heights riot and, you know, attempts by various people on both sides to kind of paper over their differences and smooth things over. And yeah, it was it was a lot of fun. I learned a lot, actually, when I was researching it. Well, the real migration from Europe of, well, I mean, we know how blacks got here.

and then there'll be immigration later. But it seems like it started around 1880 going into 1890, but there were a Jewish population. It seems like predominantly German of German Jews at the time. And they had integrated into the population. Some will argue not very well. But hey, you know, it's pretty well, though. Pretty well.

Like the German Jews, like they were. pretty assimilated in Germany, you know. And so when they came over here, they assumed, they were pretty assimilated. Right. Yeah. Because they came over, you know, there was a big German migration that came. It kind of gets forgotten because it happened at the same time as the huge migration of Irish in the mid-19th century. It was a pretty big German migration too. And some portion of those were Jews. And they, uh, you know, mostly lived up in the northern cities. And yeah, so they were there before. With the subsequent migration, uh, in the 1880s and 1890s, it seems like the, there was a worry with the group that was already

here that the assimilation here was not going to be as work as well as it did with them. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, German Jews and the Ostuden in Poland and the Russian Empire, there was a lot of animosity and mistrust there, even back in Europe. You know, you read one of the early Zionists like Hein Weizmann, write about German Jews and he despises them because he thinks they look down on Polish Jews and maybe they did to a certain extent.

You know, they were, German Jews were pretty well assimilated. They were very successful members of German society. You know, the Eastern Jews in the Russian Empire were, they were less, certainly less assimilated, but just sort of less sort of integrated into the value system and the habits of like Enlightenment Europe by that point, right? And so there was that.

But this is something that's actually happened. You know, you see the same thing when you look at the big Irish migration in the mid-19th century. There were Irish who were already here, who were well assimilated and who were, because, you know, the earliest Irish migrations into the United States were predominantly people with skills or with a good trade or with wealth, and they were coming over and integrating pretty well. And then when you had the famine in the mid-19th century, you started getting just flooded.

Our cities got flooded with just, I mean, an unbelievable, like a quarter of the entire population of Ireland moved to the United States in a short period of time. I mean, that's just unbelievable. But like, you know, and they pretty much all settled in cities, at least at first. And you had the previous Irish residents of those cities who were seeing these mostly illiterate, poor rural Irish people who are coming over and they're thinking, oh my God, like these, the Americans are going to hate Irish people now. And we're going to get sucked into that. And so they set up benevolent associations and settlement houses and various things to sort of try to integrate these people. And they did a pretty good job. And the same thing happened with German Jews when Eastern Jews started coming over in the 1880s. There was actually, you know, if you wanted to. to participate, if you were a new Jewish immigrant, you wanted to participate or benefit from some of the, like just community resources, community welfare resources or anything that were

provided by the Jewish community itself, you had to go through this process of, you know, going into these settlement houses and sort of you had to make, you had to learn English. You had, you had to assimilate, basically. And they made damn sure you did. And, you know, you even saw the same thing when you get into the 20th century. with the great migration of blacks out of the south. You know, there were black people who lived in the northern cities. Very few, but they'd lived there for a long time. These are people who would live there since before the Civil War.

And when they got up there and they started seeing their country cousins flooding into the cities, you know, they think this is bad news for us. And so, you know, there was somewhat less of an attempt to help them integrate. which may have something to do with why, you know, it didn't happen as well. Me knowing my history and especially my New York history, Harlem, jazz clubs popping up. Now we're getting into the early 1900s. It seems like not only did a lot of Jews own the jazz clubs where the blacks played out, but a lot of the Jews were musicians, were a part of that scene.

How did they get along at that time? Not bad. Not bad, actually. You know, I mean, there's always a difference in how different social classes relate to people who are different, right? You're not, if you're in the upper upper class, you're not competing for your job with a new black migrant, for example. And so there's always a little bit more room for tolerance, like the higher you are up the social scale. But not bad. You know, in 1909, you know, in 1909, I think is when the NAACP was formed and Jewish money and Jewish like executive leadership in that organization. It was critical to getting that organization going and remain critical to it like throughout most of its history. You know, it's interesting because, you know, the Jews in in Europe, especially in Eastern Europe, you know, the way you have to kind of think of them before like up to. to write around, well, about the great migration of Jews over here in the 1880s, really, is they were like a more advanced, more sophisticated gypsy group, basically. You know, they were people without a home country who lived everywhere, traveled around,

and they engaged in trades that made them useful to their host populations, right? So gypsies are a little bit more primitive in that sense. You know, there's a lot of art, music, dance, and fortune telling, you know, things like that, as well as criminal activity. But the Jews, you know, these were, you know, they had the advantage of before this was common throughout Europe, most Jews were literate because it was just part of their social tradition. And, you know, if you were, if you were literate in 1850, then, you know, there was going to be something for you to do. And, but there were also a lot of Jewish entertainers, you know, singing, dancing, things that, you know, were considered disreputable back in the day. Like, back in the day, an actor was not something that anybody wanted to associate with. Like, people might go to the shows and enjoy them, but they were considered, it was considered a disreputable trade because they just, you know, people didn't like them.

And so Jews did a lot of that. And when they come over to the United States, they did a lot of that. A lot of Jewish comedians, Jewish musicians. Jewish musicians, et cetera, and they ended up owning a lot of the jazz clubs. And, yeah, as far as I know, I mean, race relations, you know, race relations in general in the North were not really bad before the Great Migration

because there just weren't enough black people to make anybody really feel threatened as far as their job or the changing of their neighborhood. you know, the first real anti-black violence, like at a real scale that you get, other than the Civil War riots, draft riots, comes after the First World War, when a million, I don't know, it was probably about a million, actually. Black people had moved up into the cities, mostly in the east and Midwest. And, you know, because white men were over in Europe in the trenches,

and they needed labor to fill up the industrial jobs. And so they start advertising down in the South. Companies are advertising down in the South to get black workers to come up. And something that's possible now, right? Because there's railroads that are available for mass use. You know, so when those workers, when the white workers start getting back from Europe from the First World War, they find a lot of their jobs all taken up by these black people who weren't here before. And you actually did see some racial varysmal.

violence at that time. And so I think before the Great Migration, though, it was not, it was not so much of an issue. Sports. I mean, there was a time when Jews were the heavyweight champion of the world and boxing, and they basically dominated basketball. So they still do if you look at the ownership. Well, yeah, yeah. It just switched a little bit. But what do you know about how that? Because from what I understand it was another one of those things where Jewish community leaders were like, this is very disreputable. We really need to concentrate on academics. And basically they put in their neighborhood newspapers, you know, pushing people out and making other Jews feel like they shouldn't be doing this and they should be concentrating on other things. Yeah. Yeah, it's,

that's definitely the case. And if you look at the NBA, you know, that really is like the NBA and the recording industry, you know, two to which kind of come back to this topic between the relationship between blacks and Jews, right, are two areas that Jews once dominated and then moved up to the ownership level on. You know, I think out of the 30 NBA teams, 14 or 15 of them have Jewish owners. And, you know, they've had a Jewish lead commissioner since, I think 83. And David Stern was pretty much understood by everybody to be running the show as the as the second in command for a decade before that. So, you know, we're talking, what is that? 50 years that they've had a Jewish commissioner, basically. And, yeah, I mean, and that creates resentment, you know.

I mean, it's something that, you know, you see it in different ways. Like, in James Baldwin wrote this kind of infamous article back in 63. 64, I think, sometime in the 60s, called Negroes are anti-Semitic because they're anti-white. And he starts it off with, I mean, this is not something you could get published today, even by a black author. You know, he says, when I was a boy growing up in Harlem, you know, the butcher was a Jew and we hated him. The landlord was a Jew and we hated him because he wouldn't take care of our building, et cetera. You know, our teachers were mostly Jews and we hated them because they talked down to us. And he kind of just goes on and on like this.

And this is, you know, I mean, it's pretty shocking to like modern readers to read it, right? Just like that, you know, around the same time that Norman Pod Horitz article in commentary that I quote a lot is really shocking to people today, you know. And I think we've probably really lost something, you know, by not allowing people to speak openly about these things, you know. When you read Potta Hortez's article in commentary, it's called My Negro Problem in Ours. It's a famous article that one of the fathers of neoconservatism wrote. And he talks about living in, he grew up in Brownsville, actually, so right there in Brooklyn. And in a mixed neighborhood of primarily Jews, Italians, and some blacks. And when he was a boy, it was still mostly Jews and Italians.

but a growing black population. And he goes through with all these incidents when he was a kid of, you know, once when he's a 12-year-old boy, he gets attacked by a group and hitting a head with a baseball bat and just consistently getting, you know, mugged, extorted, threatened, intimidated, and beaten, like, a lot by these black kids. And he talks about how that experience growing up kind of shaped his, shaped certain views, some of which he, you know,

justifies others that he doesn't justify and that he's ashamed of, but he says that they're really there, you know? And those are, you know, that's a, that's an important article, an important perspective to get, you know, you have a 12-year-old boy who got beat over the head with a baseball bat. That's incredibly traumatic. It's incredibly traumatic for like, for the parents, you know, for everybody involved to have something like that happen. I mean, I grew up in rough neighborhoods and mostly black, black neighborhoods. And so I'm kind of used to this kind of thing. But I wonder sometimes how people who are who grew up in kind of middle class stable circumstances when they read about a 12 year old boy getting attacked and beaten over the head with the baseball bat. It's pretty shocking, you know, and it is shocking. It was really traumatic. And the feelings that somebody like Pod Horitz has that are an outgrowth of these, you know, really difficult experiences. you know, they're important to talk about, but you can't talk about them anymore. And it's unfortunate.

And just like in James Baldwin's case, too. You know, Baldwin, you can call that article anti-Semitic. I don't really think it is any more than Pud Horst's article is anti-Black. But you can read it and say that this is, you know, Baldwin's not somebody I have a lot of respect for as a writer or a thinker. I think he gets overplayed because of kind of who he was at a certain historical moment. But, you know, he, the reality was growing up in his neighborhood, the butcher was a Jew. His teachers were Jews. His landlords were Jews. The pawnbrokers were Jews. And they had a, you're going to have a difficult relationship with those people when you have an outside community that owns everything, holds all the professional jobs, etc., which makes sense.

sense because they've been here for a long time. And so they've moved up the social ladder. And you just got here. You know, your people just got here. And so it's natural that would be the case. But, you know, at a time like the 1960s when identity was becoming so important and black militancy was on the rise, you know, the idea that kind of had held among liberals up until then, that blacks would kind of travel the same path that previous immigrant groups had traveled, working their way up over the course of a few generations, you know, toward integration to the economy and everything,

that that was not a proposal that was acceptable to black people anymore in the 60s. And, you know, you can sympathize with that a bit, right? They've been here for 400 years, and you have second generation immigrants telling them to get in line and do what their parents did. And you can see why they would chafe against that. But at the same time, you know, that's the path. is the path towards success and integration. And when it was abandoned, you know, we're still living

with the consequences of that shift in identity and ideology among black people in the 1960s. Yeah, the intermediary, the merchant in the neighborhood that's not from there, it doesn't have to be the Jew. I mean, how many rap songs in the 90s were about the Korean grocer in Los Angeles? There's always going to be. That's seen in menace to society. Yeah. You know, people watch it today and they're like, you know, what's going on? Or just people watch it today, I noticed. And what they see is like there's a shop that happens to be run by this Korean couple. And, you know, the black kid shoots them. It's like, no, that was, they're talking about something that was a prevailing theme in, you know, like you said, rap songs and other black media. This was something that was that everybody talked about in black communities all the time is the Korean grocery, you know. So yeah, it doesn't have to be at all. I mean, really, like, if you look at the L.A. riots, 2,000 Korean businesses were burned down during the L.A. riots.

2,000. When you look at, like, the Detroit riot in 1967, where they had to call them the 82nd Airborne and the 101st, and, I mean, it was all out war. There were, it was one of the nastiest riots in the country's history. There was something like four or five hundred buildings got burned down. 2,000 Korean businesses got burned down. There were videos of groups of black rioters saying, you know, stay away from that block over there.

That's all owned by our people. Let's go get those fucking Koreans. And so, I mean, that's a pogrom by any definition of the word. And, you know, that happened in 92. In 91, you have the Crown Heights riot where a bunch of predominantly like Jamaican and Caribbean Islander. Black residents of this neighborhood in Brooklyn, you know, went on, I hesitate to call it a pogrom. Not a lot of damage was done, and only one person was killed.

But you did have, like, mobs of black people marching through the streets saying Hitler didn't finish the job and get the Jew and stuff. And so, and both of those were very much driven by the animosity that led to them was driven by similar circumstances. You know, it happened to be the Koreans in L.A. who owned all the businesses in black communities. In, you know, in Brooklyn, it happened to be a lot of Jews. And, you know, it is, it's a, yeah, it's a problem, right? Because, I mean, on one hand, if you look at the New York situation, it's a little different than the Koreans because the Koreans moved into black neighborhoods and opened these businesses and took over kind of the commerce in those areas. on the east coast in the Midwest, the Catholic and Jewish Euroethics that had previously lived in those places, owned the real estate, owned the businesses. You know, they got driven out by the influx of black migrants from the South. And so they just owned what they had always owned, and they just continued to own it now that the population had changed.

And, you know, that's just something that you're, you know, people can chant diversities are strength all. they want. And maybe on some level and in certain ways, it does strengthen us. But there are also extreme difficulties with managing a diverse society, you know, especially when when ethnicity or race corresponds with social class in an uncomfortable way. You know, it's very difficult to manage these things, especially in a democracy, quote unquote, where there's just always going to be an incentive for demagogues to rise up and say the reason you're down here is because, you know, those people up there don't like you. And it's a very appealing message to people who are in rough circumstances, you know. I think if the Irish or the Jews when they first came and in the

first generation or two when they were down at the bottom of the social scale, if they had had, you know, sort of that same level of resentment for where they were starting out and everything, that a lot of blacks kind of embraced in the 20th century, they probably would have ended up in a similar bad situation, you know, but it was really the opposite. I mean, they were, I mean, shoot, they, we all know, like, people change their names to make them more familiar to Americans. You hear about, like, ethnics in the eastern cities who, you know,

the parents are immigrants, and they won't allow their children to speak the mother tongue at They're like, you speak English in this country and you hear about that. Or even my family, like, you know, on my father's side, my father's side came out to California as part of the Oki migration during the Dust Bowl in the 30s. And, you know, that's something that is sort of romanticized for most people because of John Steinbeck and so forth. But this was like, it was very, very similar. It was a smaller scale. But, you know, you got these people who were like rowdy, hard drinking, fighting rural southerners who were used to being basically sharecroppers or just above sharecroppers who are now moving over into California. And people did not like them.

You know, they thought of them as vulgar. And the tent cities that sprang up to house them were, you know, considered like just dens of vice and crime. and just disorder. You know, there was a famous incident where the LAPD actually took up positions on a freeway or a highway coming into, I guess it wouldn't have been a freeway, but a road coming into Los Angeles County to prevent a caravan of Oakeys from coming into L.A. County because they didn't want them there. And so, you know, these are these are the kind of things that, these are the kind of things that happened in a country like, like, you know, ours. You know, there's a reason that the Russians, for example, the Russian Empire, you know, people hear about how, you know, Jews were restricted to the pale of settlement. They could only live in the pale of settlement, which is a huge, huge piece of territory. But, you know, the Russians

understood that they were running an empire. The fact that they had all these different people, by definition, you're kind of running an empire by that point. And so, you know, it wasn't just the Jews who had to stay in the pale of settlement. The Tadars had to stay over there. Everybody had to stay. Because they knew that once they start allowing everybody to just move around, you're going to get conflict. And they didn't want to deal.

They didn't want to have to deal with that, you know? And, I mean, you know, after they started to loosen those rules, actually, in the late 1900s, you did start to get, in the late 1800s. You did start to get conflict. And that conflict was, had a lot to do with the Jews starting to move over to the United States. So, you know, you read about, like, a lot of the pogroms that happened in, uh, in, in, in the Russian Empire starting in the 1880s. And you get the impression sometimes from reading them, unless you read like a deep history of it, that these are just like a bunch of Russians who hate Jews attacking the Jews.

And when a lot of the times, it was actually like, you know, like you're in Odessa. And it's the Greek community there that is in direct competition with the Jews. who have now moved in there for all of these industries that they used to dominate. So that's the source of the conflict. And they were the ones kind of leading a program there. You see that a lot, you know. These are just the difficulties, again, of trying to manage a diverse society. And, you know, when your way of trying to manage that is to just not let anybody talk about it,

not let anybody voice their frustrations or their fears, you know, things build up under the surface until, until enough pressure builds up that they blow out. Yeah, I've talked about the Odessa program of 1905 before and how the United States government sanctioned Tsar Nicholas over that. And you're like, why? It's like who in the government is telling, who's made it into the government is like, we need to sanction this country, this little city because of this, something that happened halfway around the world. But I wanted to go back to something that you had talked about. You had talked

about how the NAACP was basically started by Jews, funded by Jews, and why? You know, that's a good question. It's an interesting one. I mean, on one level, you can understand why Jews were involved with the civil rights movement, sort of identified with the plight of black people in America before anybody else. A huge, part of their of Jewish identity is tied up, excuse me, in their sense of being like history's victims, you know, that's, you know, before the 20th century, that was their religious identity. You know, there were slaves in Egypt, and then they kept getting exiled and chased around, and that really was like the basis of their group identity in a lot of ways.

You get up to the 20th century, you know, I saw a, it's like a pew or Gallup poll that took place several years ago where they were asking Jews around the country what they thought the basis of like the primary basis of Jewish identity was. It was like, you know, belief in the Torah, you know, affinity for the state of Israel. The Holocaust, remembering the Holocaust was like, it got like 70%. And so you have like an identity that is that is very much based on a sense of victimhood. And you can understand why they would identify with another group of people who were, you know, clearly second-class citizens as they were, you know, in certain ways in the Russian Empire, although that gets overplayed in many, many ways.

But you can understand where that certain sympathy would come from. Part of it probably also has a lot to do with the fact that the Eastern Jews who were coming over, you know, they were coming at a time when, when like, revolutionary and socialist revolutionary politics had, just consumed the Jewish community, especially the young people. You read about another, there was a letter from that same Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann, was writing to another Zionist leader about how he was over in Poland, trying to get people to trying to find young Jews, to convince him to be Zionists, why they need to come down to Palestine and so forth.

He says, I can't find any. He says every stattel I go to, every village I go to, there's a bunch of kids, There's a bunch of old people. All the young people have left. They're all communist now or they're all, you know, involved in some movement like this. And that's why, you know, in 1925, Winston Churchill wrote that article, communism versus Bolshevism versus Zionism. And it's pretty hilarious to read today. It reads like something.

Especially when you know the history of World War II. Yeah. Yeah. And Churchill specifically, right. But, you know, he, you read it today, and just with the level of knowledge most people have about these issues today, it reads like an insane John Birch conspiracy screen or something. But it's really not. You know, and he was presenting the question to English readers the way that Jews, like Zionist Jews, were presenting it to their own people, which is that everybody, there was not a neutral Jew, a young person. as the young people went left in the pale of settlement. That's probably an exaggeration,

but not much of one. They were all either going over into like communist and left-wing politics or they were becoming Zionists. And it really was like a battle for the Jewish soul in a way. And, you know, that sense of that sense of being history's victims, I think probably did have a lot to do with the sympathy that they that they had for blacks. But it also ended up becoming the source of a lot of, you know, black animosity toward Jews. Because the simple fact of the matter was that, you know, for everything we hear today about university quotas and some social club that, you know, didn't allow Jewish members or something, that Jews did find in the United States from the time they got here, you know, there were,

they certainly didn't face any more obstacles to their integration and success than like the Irish or the Italians did. And they integrate, and by the time you get up into the 20th century when the civil rights movement really gets going, you know, it could really great on like a black activist to hear a Jewish student who had come down to Mississippi from the summer off from Columbia, you know, or Harvard coming down and being like, yeah, you know, I'm just like you. Like, I totally understand what you're going through because I'm Jewish. And, you know, so it eventually ended up leading to a lot of the problems, you know, that sense of like, you know, who are you kidding? Like, that's, that's ridiculous. Well, you had mentioned earlier the Great Migration.

Can you say what, when that was and the numbers and. Yeah. Yeah. So when the First World War broke out, you know, all those cities in the north that you think of today as being like centers of black life in America, you know, Baltimore, Philly, New York, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, all of them. The black populations of those cities was typically between like one and at the highest, like, maybe 5%. Very small populations. 95% of all the black people in the country still lived in the rural South. And the First World War comes along and we send millions of white men over into the trenches in Europe and working administrative jobs for the military. And they have to leave their industrial jobs right at a time when the industrial base is expanding hugely because of the war.

And so, you know, everybody hears about Rosie the Riveter during World War II. the women moving into the workforce, and that did happen to a degree. But the black population being brought up into the north to be integrated into the industrial workforce was really the primary way that they filled it. And so starting with the First World War in 1917, you start getting a large migration. It kind of becomes a flood very quickly because, you know, one goes up there and he finds a job and he sends for others. And, you know, they write back about how great it is.

up there with no Jim Crow or whatever because things really hadn't started to deteriorate the way that they would by the time you get to the 50s and 60s. And so it becomes a big flood. You know, you read like Isabella Patterson's book, The Warmth of Other Suns, which is about the Great Migration. And it, you know, it portrays it. It's a totally very, like, its angle is like this was the experience of these black families and stuff as they were making this trip and this transition, right? And so that's what it is. And you get, you know, one of the things she talks about is how once this got going and started building, I mean, it was just a mad rush out of the south. And you had big spikes during the First World War, continued, you know, lowered a little bit, but continued

until the Second World War. And then, you know, I think we had something like 16 or 17 million men called up for the Second World War, serving in various capacities. And most of those were white men because the, you know, the armed forces were still segregated. And so that created a huge hole. Part of it was filled by Rosie the Riveter. A much larger part of it was filled by a huge influx of black people coming from the South. I mean, you read about like, you know, like that neighborhood of Brownsville, where Pod Horitz was from and where that teacher strike took place. I won't get the year exactly right, but it's like 1955. As late as 195, it's still like 70% Jewish and Italian.

You get up to 1965 or I think 1967, so like a decade later, it's 96% black in Puerto Rican. I mean, you're talking about a massive influx, you know, 800,000 people moving into New York over the course of like a decade and a half. Just huge. And obviously overwhelmed the city's ability to absorb these people, you know. they didn't have places for them to live. They didn't have, you know, enough school facilities. They didn't have the infrastructure to handle all this, you know, especially since these people were coming up, like the Irish in the mid-19th century, you know, these are primarily

like illiterate sharecroppers from the rural South, many of whom have never seen a big metropolis like New York City, you know, and let alone lived in one or participated in, you know, the complex credit economy that was developing in the cities or, you know, being subject to sort of regimented industrial labor, you know, and they struggled, you know, just like the Irish struggled. And, you know, by the time you get up to the 50s and 60s, as white flight is like really taken hold, you know, you have these neighborhoods that are, again, like 90, 95 percent black and a smattering of Puerto Ricans in them. And, you know, all of the businesses primarily, all of the professional jobs like teachers

and civil servants and various things that are still in those places, most of the cops are still white. And, you know, it's a, if somebody were to ask me, like, could this have gone any differently? I don't know if it really could have gone any better than it did. I mean, without our political system just being completely different than it was. If we had a political system that in 1961, you know, through a hood over Malcolm X's head and dumped them off in the middle of the ocean, maybe you could deal with this a little bit differently. But in our society where it's sort of open to demagogues and people who were going to stir up anger for their own, sort of for their own reasons, very, very difficult, I think, to. especially because like it was just it was inevitable that the black people who were coming up from the rural south it was inevitable they were going to be at the bottom of the social scale you know they didn't have any skills that were applicable to city life um they most of them couldn't read you know um taking taking discrimination like completely out of the picture like they were going to be at the bottom just like the irish were at the bottom when they came in the 1850s and you actually see

like before you get up to the era that you know the build up toward the 60s it started in the 50s but before you get to that era have you ever seen that show um boardwalk empire yes yeah so you know the black character chalky white right yep yep yeah so the way his wife behaves with her kids and stuff you remember that that was that's a real thing there was there was that immigrant mentality of like we need to uh we need to assimilate into this society we need to be be more prim and proper and more orderly and everything than the whites so that we can like assimilate into this society. But her husband who's like kind of more more street, you know, he goes along. He lets her kind of run the household. But every time something like this comes up,

you know, he voices his displeasure. You know, he sees it as, you know, selling out and bowing to the white man and everything. And it's like, you know, look, given the history, of blacks in this country, like, I understand where that mentality comes from, you know, like there's, there's a certain level of like inevitable historical shame that comes with the fact, you know, the simple fact that, you know, your whole, all of your ancestors were slaves of the people who you now live around and whose society you're trying to integrate into, right? And so you can understand where that resentment comes from, but it's very, it's very counterproductive. And in his mentality, when you get up into the 50s and 60s, you know, of resenting all that is selling out to the white man and everything became dominant by the time you get to the 60s.

And so, I mean, you really start to see like, you start to see just writings from very prominent like black intellectuals in the 1960s who are, you know, they still say this stuff today, but it all started in the 60s about how, um, You know, things like kids' disruptive behavior in schools. Like, well, you're holding them to white standards. Or just all of these other different things. It's like that is just an objectively, like, you're going down a very bad road, you know, and you're not going to make much progress with that kind of a mentality. Even if you can sympathize with or understand where it came from, it definitely derailed them. I mean, if you look at pretty much any statistic you want to look at for black American.

from the end of the Civil War, up through about the mid-50s to the early 60s, everything you want to look at, from wealth to just everything. It's up, up, up, up, up, up. And then you hit the 60s when you get the Civil Rights Act, you get the Voting Rights Act, you get this sort of mass consciousness among white America that this is an issue that maybe needs to be addressed. And, you know, so you would expect if it was going up before, it would just skyrocket at this point. But you can look at those graphs and you start with the 60s and everything just collapses. And it's collapsed, you know, really to the present day.

I mean, it's, you know, things like crime rates obviously have decreased since the 1990s. But, you know, the proportion of who's committing the crimes really is not changed. And, you know, that's something like, when we talk about white flight, you know, people just, people today really don't have any, they don't have like a real understanding of what it's like. I mean, you just have to imagine, like my wife's Armenian, right? And so over here in Glendale and Los Angeles, that's the Armenian neighbor. There's buildings with Armenian writing all over them and, you know, there's other people there. But that's, there are more Armenians in Glendale than there are in any place in the world other than Yerevan, you know, the capital of Armenia. It's the little Armenia. That's what it is.

And so, you know, you just imagine a place like that or a Chinatown, you know, something that over the course of 10 years is 95% plaque. And all the crime is being committed by this new group of people. All of the disorder, you know, is being committed by these new group of people. And you're going to have real issues. I mean, you know, and, you know, people, you know, people, were, people were afraid. I mean, you know, like, it doesn't matter how, how liberal you are. When your, when your kid comes home with, you know, having taken a baseball bat to the head at school that day, you're going to start looking for, you know, for rental or real estate ads in the suburbs, you know, and that's really what happened in the 60, well, started in the 50s,

but was completed by the 60s. When you look at Brown versus Board of Education, 1954, We know who wrote it. They have Jewish last names. They wanted to, for whatever reason, not going to point any fingers and say anything, you know, say it was for nefarious reasons, but they wanted to integrate the schools. And almost immediately,

it became evident that that was a really, really bad idea. and I mean, how do we talk about that? I mean, I've been talking about it by reading a book that takes place in the late 60s, but starts in 1958 talking about the formation of the New York City Teachers Union, the UFT. And what happened? I mean, what happened? It was, sure, there were crime rates that were out of control. But there was not this, the militancy that really, really did this in.

And where did that militancy come from, though? You know, I think part of it had to do with before the mid-60s, you know, the whole focus of the black rights movement in America was all on the South. and this was you know that that was a problem that you could look at and it was a very concrete problem right from the standpoint of like the people who were pushing integration like it was a very concrete problem to fix and the black people in the south you know they may have resented jim crow they may have resented you know just the whole situation down there but just over the years um had kind of learned to live with that a little bit and learned uh You know, like there was, I was reading recently this story of this book about the Black Liberation Army. And in the early 70s, they were running around killing cops. And one of them mentions, he's interviewing one of them. And he talks about how he would always drive whenever they were going somewhere because him being from the South had manners when it came to white people.

Because he's, yes, sir, no, sir. You know how to talk like that. Whereas his buddies who were in the car with them who grew up in, you know, the Bronx, they didn't have any of that. And you kind of get an, this is something that like, I don't, I don't think I've ever seen anybody else really point out. But I think it, I think it's definitely got a lot to do with it. Is, you know, any group of immigrants. And I'm going to call the blacks of the great migration immigrants just because, I mean, shoot, when you're moving from Louisiana to Los Angeles or Oakland, I mean, that's a much larger migration than moving from, you know, Greece to Italy or something, right, in terms of, and it's probably just. just as culturally shocking. And, you know, when other immigrant groups would come in, oh, gosh, I lost my train of thought. Put that aside.

I was going to say that, bail me out here. I'll think of it. Well, we were talking about segregation. Well, we're talking about integration, integrating the schools, said it was easier in the So then you started talking about the book you were reading and how. Right, right, right, right. So, you know, that he had those southern manners. And I haven't seen anybody else really kind of put this out in a direct way.

But I think people probably thought about it at least is, you know, any immigrant group that comes into a place usually. And you hear this all the time. When people point out, like today they're talking about Latin American immigrants and they say, oh, they have a lower crime rate than, you know, than American citizens. And it's like, okay, that's true. But what about their kids? Because that's a different situation. That is when you really start to see that kind of thing.

And you really saw that with the, you know, because immigrants, you come into a place and you're trying to get along. You know, you're trying to find your little place and keep your head down and, you know, work and raise your family. Plus, if you are an immigrant who's coming from a place, you know, as a refugee of some kind, you know, even an economic refugee or something. Whatever things are like in the new country is probably somewhat better than it was in the old country. So you don't, you know, that's what you have to compare to. And so the black migrants who came up into the north and south from the south, you know,

these are people who had lived their lives and their parents had lived their lives in the South where they understood that there were, you know, the bad things happened if you pissed off the white people. And there was just a certain level of deference. that they may have resented, but they had sort of learned to just, it was just a part of the way they approached the world, right? And their kids, you know, were the kids who grew up beating the shit out of Norman Pod Horowitz at school, right?

And they realized that, you know, they didn't have to be afraid of white people, that, you know, most of the time white people were afraid of them. You know, that's one of the dirty secrets kind of like modern America is that. that most white people are afraid of black people. Liberals, conservatives, they really are. You don't see it as much in the South. Southerners, it's not so true. But up in the cities,

your average white person is afraid of black people. And not just because they could call them, you know, a racist and get them in trouble or something. There's just a certain, you know, there's a fear there that a lot of people have, you know, and I notice it because I grew up around black people. And so I have a comfort with them that is kind of bone deep, But, you know, that second generation started to come of age in the late 50s, early 60s.

And so now you have these young adult black kids who never lived in the South who grew up watching their parents kind of be deferential to the white people and, you know, didn't like seeing that. But now they're 18, 19, 20 years old. And they grew up, you know, again, in this mixed. mixed-race schools with white kids who were afraid of getting beaten up by them. And they didn't have any of that fear. And so there was, you know, you would never have seen a, I want to say never, but like it would have been very rare for a first generation black migrant from the South to, you know, to talk back to or let alone get violent with a police officer in the North.

Just like would be very rare because they understood like, you know, or they probably, they assumed something that probably wasn't so true that there would be real consequences for that. And, you know, their kids just didn't think that way. And they were much more willing to to just, yeah, get wild, I guess. Let's get into it. Let's get into the riots in the 60s. Yeah, the first real race riot, I think, like, you know, at least at a real scale, was probably Harlem in 1964. And it wasn't huge compared to what you'd see the next year in Watts or or the rest of the decade.

But, you know, that happened. And you asked, like, where the militancy came from. This is something I've been reading about lately. And it's hard to find really good stuff on it. But I have been finding a few things. There was certainly, like, an element in the rise in black militancy. How great of a factor it was. I'm still trying to hash out.

But an element was definitely a communist subversion. You know, like the American Communist Party in that 1964 Harlem riot. you know, there's a, there was a famous black activist who, you know, he told a reporter, or he was given a speech, maybe in a reporter, heard it, that if he had a hundred dedicated black militants who were black guerrillas who were ready to die for the cause, they could burn the whole city down. And like they were talking like, that guy was one of the leaders of the New York branch of the Communist Party of America, right? And you see this a lot in a lot of these riots where the people who are primarily inciting them have not sort of indirect but direct

affiliations with the CPUSA. And so that might be, have something to do with it as well. When you get up to, you know, book by Rick Pearlstein, Nixon land, who, you know, I don't agree with his politics or anything, but sometimes he still find good historical anecdotes. you know, he talks about how he talks about this period in 1964, 65, or in 65, when Lyndon Johnson had, you know, won the presidency easily. And they're about to pass the Voting Rights Act. And there's this period. You read the rhetoric from Lyndon Johnson from, you know, just senators, other, you know, major leaders. And they're still talking like the future that's coming is this Star Trek Jetsons just utopia, you know. And they really. still thought that up till like 65. And it's very interesting because, you know, Lyndon Johnson gave like most famous speech of his career on the eve of the passage of the Voting Rights Act and in 65, which was happening at the same time that the Selma marches were going on. And it's just a,

I mean, it's almost like a, it's a sermon more than it is a speech, really, you know? I mean, it really is just this soaring rhetoric and everything. And one week later, the Watts Riot in Los Angeles broke out. And this was something that like, you know, the Harlem Riot in 64 didn't get a lot of national publicity. It was something that New Yorkers knew about, but most people outside of there didn't. The Watts right was so huge and the aggression was so intense. And the level of devastation that people were seeing was so overwhelming. I mean, you had, you know, because this was a, this was a televised riot.

It was the first major televised riot in America. You had, you know, so people were glued to their screens for four or five days watching live footage of, you know, firefighters trying to put out fires and getting attacked by mobs and the mobs dancing around the burning building, you know, and, you know, or watching footage from a, from a TV news helicopter that suddenly has to veer away. because it's taking small arms fire from the ground, you know. And so people are watching this and they're like, you know, if you read like Christopher Caldwell's book, Age of Entitlement, for example, he really does a great job of showing how when Americans passed the Civil Rights Act, they looked at that almost as like a foreign policy issue.

There was this very specific problem in the South where, you know, the southern institutions, the governments and stuff down there were denying black people, that the Supreme Court had said that they have, and you've got to give the federal government certain special emergency powers to deal with this crisis, basically, right? That's how people saw it. And they didn't understand they were bringing in, you know, the way Caldwell puts is it is a rival constitution, you know,

and just a whole new approach to politics in America really was inaugurated with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. And, you know, so that happened. You have like, you know, the Civil Rights Act passes in 64. Again, most people outside the South see that as almost a foreign policy issue for those people over there. And then you have the Voting Rights Act. Same thing. That's how people are seeing it.

And then you have one week after the Voting Rights Act, you have the Watts riots. And it's nationally televised. And people are starting to realize that like, oh, this is actually, you know, this isn't just a southern problem. This is an everybody problem. And, you know, the way the Watts riots were covered. and the way they were sort of taken up by black militants at that point. And the fact that the older civil rights leaders, you know, generation, the Martin Luther King generation by the time you get up, really after the passage of the Voting Rights Act,

really was on the decline, you know, because what could be achieved in the South had been achieved by those two laws, you know, that was the thinking. And so they shifted their focus to the north. And it was just clear immediately that, you know, that these guys were not prepared for, they didn't have any answers for the black people in the north. Because these weren't problems of like you can't vote or you're not allowed to go in to that establishment or something. I mean, these were much more complicated socioeconomic and social friction issues that a march was really not going to do a whole lot to fix. right. So you see like in 1966 when King goes up to Marquette Park in Chicago,

he didn't achieve anything there. You know, the white people, or I think, as I understand it, the neighborhood he was trying to integrate, you know, people think of it as a white neighborhood today and the white people came out and counter-protested and everything. But really, it was actually a Lithuanian neighborhood. It was a Lithuanian Catholic parish neighborhood. And I think King probably didn't even understand that. I think because in the south, that's not how it was. You know, in the South, racial politics was the order of the day, right?

I mean, because that's just how people thought based on, you know, I mean, they're, you know, because, mainly because all of the Euroethics that started to mass immigrate into the U.S. in the 18th and 19th century, they didn't move to the south. They moved to the northern cities. And so whereas you had ethnic politics in the north, you had racial

politics in the south. And so when, you know, King goes up to Chicago into this Lithuanian Catholic parish, and he's trying to, you know, integrate the neighborhood, you know, they, they see this as an attack on them specifically. And, you know, the really interesting thing is I'm working on a piece about this right now is in a lot of ways it really was. You know, the WASP establishment in the country, you know, they really did see, John Lindsay, the mayor of New York in 65, his first welfare commissioner,

guy named Morris, he actually uses the term battering rent. He says, were you going to use the black migrants as a battering ram to break up these little ethnic enclaves that create so much political corruption as they see it and all this stuff? And so they really did view it that way. And there's a lot there. I got a whole list of quotes and examples and stuff that I'm going to put out in this piece about how direct and aggressive, like this was an attack on primarily Catholic, but ended up in New York at least, Jewish communities as well. And, you know, so what ended up happening eventually, just partly because, you know, the, like, we were talking about this before we got on the air, you go to a place like New York, which is so fascinating if you're, if you want to learn about the history of like American ethnic politics, right? It's, you know, you had, if you go back to the 1950s and you read liberals in New York talking about what do we do?

about this huge influx of black migrants. You know, these people are struggling. There's all these things. So how are we going to deal with this? And they were all very optimistic that, okay, you had Jews. They had their neighborhoods and their interests and certain elements of, you know, the social service jobs, like the teachers, for example, that were theirs, the Irish, they got their neighborhoods.

And there's certain, like, parts of the government that everybody kind of understands the Irish are kind of, you know. And they were the cops. and the firefighters, the Italians got the construction contracts with the city, and they ran waste management, and that the blacks would come in and kind of take their place as one of the ethnicities in New York City. And what happened was the influx was so big and ended up being so disruptive and so traumatic for all of the people who were affected by it, that it really, you know, the great migration

kind of really put an end to ethnic politics in America, which again was part of that was on purpose. Like that's something that the wasp wanted to accomplish, you know. And it really did put an end to it. You don't really hear anything about, you know, as little things here and there with the exception of Jews, actually, because they, you know, they're the one group that didn't, when they moved out to the suburbs, didn't just become kind of white people, you know.

Like, there's Irish Americans now who are going to be celebrating drinking green beer this weekend. But, you know, I mean, it's not their, it's not the core of their identity in a way that being like a Jewish American is so important to their identity. And so, you know, it imported the sort of southern racial perspective into the northern cities where previously there had been like an ethnic perspective on how politics works. And you had all of these people who, you know, lived in the neighborhoods where the black people were moving in. And, you know, of course, you know, these are poor black people. And so they're moving into neighborhoods that they can afford to live in. And so those are typically the neighborhoods that immigrants of the previous generation, you know, lived in. A lot of them just buying their first house after their parents, you know, you're some Italian, your father was an Italian immigrant, worked on the docks his whole life, you know, and now you as his son, you work in like waste management in the city and you bought a house. You know, your father, you grew up in a tenement building with like, all the other Italian immigrants, now you bought your own house. And that's what your whole neighborhood is. It's a bunch of your people, you know, Italian Catholics with an Italian Catholic church, like in the center of the neighborhood that everybody goes to and it's a center of community life and, you know, all of this. And then all of a sudden you get this massive influx of people from the South who, again, are just very, you know, their their habits were,

it's not just black people like again you go back to the oakees you know um out in california everybody saw them as disruptive and they they were um you had the big appalachian uh migration up into some of the midwestern cities like detroit in the mid 20th century and it's the same thing they were disruptive the so you know these are rural southerners had more of like an honor culture you know so if you uh if they you know you insult them you're more likely to get punched in the face then reported to the principal. And the blacks were like that too. You know, they had that mentality and then they had some racial resentment and animosity built on top of that. So you got all these people who lived in these neighborhoods who, you know, they all scattered. They all moved out to the

suburbs, which were being thrown up after the war. And now, you know, you don't live in a parish community. You're a second generation Italian. And over here is like a wasp neighbor. And over there is, you know, just your whole neighborhood's mixed and your kids go to a public school that's not primarily anything. And all of those people, with the exception of Jews, you know, kind of stopped being Irish or Italian or anything like that and became white people. And, you know, that's really kind of the shape that politics has kept ever since then, where, you know, now there's more people, more people other than blacks who are non-white people in the country, whereas back then it was. Back then it was. was like pretty much 90% to 10% of the smattering of others. And so you have like the, you know, the very phrase, people of color. I mean, that's something that divides the world into two halves. You got white people and you got everybody else. And, you know, again, it's, it's a really interesting thing to read about how, you know, the, the,

we talk about like segregation in the northern cities. And we think like of racial segregation in the northern cities that this was like, just this profound evil that had to be eradicated and changed. The people who lived in those cities, the way they saw it is the cities have always been segregated. You know, the Italians live over there, the Irish live over there,

the Jews live over there. In between, you know, there's mixed neighborhoods and so forth. But like, that's how it has always worked. And, you know,

so they, they just didn't under, they didn't understand, like, why, where this push was coming from, you know, to break up their neighborhoods like this.

And yeah, I mean, it's, you know, the consequences of the great migration, the problems that resulted from it, you know, et cetera, like have pretty much defined domestic politics in the U.S. since the early 20th century. So, like, since the First World War. I mean, just there's been other issues, obviously, but the overriding issue in the country, domestically speaking, has been the racial question ever since then. It's, you know, and that's a result of like people, you know, people have this idea that because like, you know, New York City or something was run by white people that they just didn't care about the black people that were in those cities. And that's, you know, why they didn't get social services or why their schools were bad or whatever. That is just not true, at least in most of the big cities. I mean, when you look at the amount of attention and in local politics that was spent on how do we fix this, the amount of money that was spent.

You could really look at, like, the Great Society programs in 65 was really like an attempt. It was like it was almost a bailout of the cities by the federal government. They were like, we need to take some of the burden and cost that this is imposing on these cities up to the federal level because, you know, we're better equipped to handle it. And it's really been the case for, you know, 100 years is this, you know, is what to do about it, how to fix it. And we've gone through different permutations, right, where you go through the 1960s and, you know, we can maybe talk about this next. But, you know, by the time you get up to the late 60s, you have a split between the Jewish and black activist communities. That's what that's exactly where I wanted to go. Okay.

Yeah. So for several reasons, you know, partly because, you know, there were real resentments that resulted from, you know, you got to, you just have to put yourself like, you go. like the Freedom Summer and you read about you read the criticisms of someone like Stokely Carmichael you have all these Jewish students who come down from the University of Wisconsin and you know Harvard and Columbia and everything graduate students you know taking their summers off to go work in the Freedom Summer and they go down there and for every one of them you know there's 30 black activists who are down there in the South community members who were part of this part of this thing and they come down a lot of these people you know they're illiterate or they're

certainly not educated, you know, at all. They don't have any experience running movements or organizations like these, you know, university activists do. And they would come in and, you know, like Stokely Carmichael's the big one who, um, he, you know, he says these people are just pushy. They're condescending. They're coming in like trying to, I mean, like the SNCC student nonviolent coordinating committee, which is the biggest black youth movement in, uh, in, in, in the country back then. Um, you know, they, when they were. asking for white students to come down and participate. They didn't want any more than 100 to come down. And they screened the ones that came in for what SNCC called. They didn't want anybody with a

John Brown complex. You know, somebody who was coming in to save the Southern Negro. They didn't want that. And, you know, word kind of spread what was happening. And they got way more than a hundred people and that a lot of them had the John Brown complex and that really did kind of happen. It created that resentment. And as you start to get into the mid-60s, well, I think in 67 is when the crisis of the Negro intellectual was published. In that book, I mean, he gets pretty direct about how, you know, he talks about how there's too much Jewish involvement in our movements. And we're never going to get anywhere until black people run the black rights movements. And so there's that. And then also in 1967, that's when the Six Day War happened.

And the global left kind of, you know, en masse turned on Israel. And, you know, by that point, the sort of integrationist Martin Luther King angle on the Black Rights movement had really surrendered the field to the black power movement that very much identified with the Third World. You know, they, the rhetoric back then was, you know, the French are attacking the Arabs in Algeria. We're attacking the Vietnamese over in Vietnam. And, you know, right here in America, like, we're part of all that. They identified with the Vietnamese, the Algerians, and so forth as part of the third world, that they were this captive population in America, right? And which was, you know, which was not the approach of the, like, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference guys. I mean, they were very American, if they were anything, you know.

But, you know, it's, again, it's another thing that's understandable. You go, you know, if you're, if you're a black person in America from the end of the Civil War on up until, you know, around the 50s or 60s in the 20th century, you know, your history is not really something to write home about. You know, it's something that you've been subjugated. you've been second-class citizens, you've been discriminated against, and now even where you're not discriminated against, you're the poorest people in the city. And like, it's just, and so when,

and then even back before slavery, like nobody had ever even heard of like an independent black African country. You know, they've been colonized for hundreds and hundreds of years, right? And so when you started to get these post-colonial nationalist movements in Africa, you know, uh,

leaders like Patrice Lumumba, um, you know, all these were, they were idolized in the black community, especially in Harlem. And you can understand why. I mean, it's like, you know, you see it today when the Black Panther movie comes out, right? That Wakanda stuff. And people laugh at it.

I'm laughing a little bit now, but I sympathize with it, you know, these are people who, you know, Tyrone Jackson is not an African name. You know, Tyrone is a county in Ireland, Jackson, you know. And so these people lost everything. They lost their identity. they lost their religion. They lost everything that kind of tied them together. And so they're trying to put something back together. And I mean, I think you see this white people a lot these days because white people have been so deracinated and lost their own any sense of their own history or heritage that you see people, I mean, whether it's a neo-pagan movement or just there's a million different varieties. And I sympathize with all of them, including, you know, Wakanda forever because people need an identity, you know. And yeah, so, you know, when, anyway, I was talking about Israel. Six-day war happens.

The global left turns on Israel. And they start to be viewed as, you know, not this rag-tag state, like refugee state, you know, of these people who have been persecuted and carved out a homeland for themselves. The global left really started to look at them as, you know, the front line of white imperialism in the colored countries in the global South. in the global south. And, you know, by that point, again, you know, the third worldist kind of black militant view of things had really taken over in America. And so they went along with that, you know, and they absorbed that anti-Zionism. And that really was like the big break because back then, even like liberal Jews, like today

you have, you know, now that Lakud has been in power for basically 40 years straight, you know, liberal Jews in America are kind of, at least when they're not in a militia. moment of crisis are kind of like touch and go about their relationship with Israel, right? But back then, that wasn't the case. Other than some extreme far-left Jews, like the ones who, you know, made up the weathermen crew and everything, which were very small in number, all Jews in America were affectionate toward Israel and, you know, for obvious reasons. And so when black people started turning very, you know, very violently against Israel, that was a huge break. And that happened, And in 67, that's when SNCC expelled all of its white members.

And at that point, those white members were still 70 or 80% Jews. And they were really expelling their Jewish members. And there was actually, like, at the SNCC conference in 67, there was a, like, some of the Panthers who were there insisted on a vote that the organization take, you know, a negative position towards Zionism in Israel. And, of course, the white students protested and stuff. and they expelled them and they just kicked them out. And so that starts to happen. And I tend to think that, and I may be over, I may be kind of imposing my own view on this,

but by the time you get up to 68 and Nixon is elected, and, you know, he turns this, again, this question that really has been the dominant domestic question of the last hundred years in America, the racial question. He, I said we go through permutations and like variations of how it works. We had been in like a period of like, how do we solve this in a way that brings these people into the fold and helps solve all these problems? Nixon came in and by that point, people were so fed up with the riots, with the crime, with, you know, just everything that it, from that period

on, like Nixon approached it as, this is primarily a law enforcement problem. This isn't a problem for social workers. This isn't a problem for, you know, psychologists. This is this is a law enforcement problem and that's what we're going to focus on. So all the great society stuff, everything, that all went away. The cities, of course, had become dependent on that federal money from the great society by that point. And all the cities just, you know, they were already in bad shape, but, you know, you get up to the late 60s and they just absolutely fall apart. And you see this steady rise in crime through the 70s, 80s and up into the early 90s that I think, you know, people today, like younger people today, like I lived in South L.A. in 1992. I wasn't in a riot zone or

anything, but I was close enough and I went to school with kids who were. And, you know, people don't realize that, for example, like in the three years before the L.A. riots, three years, there were over 6,500 drive-by shootings in Los Angeles County. They didn't all result in deaths or anything, but that's like five a day. Okay. And when you think about the fact that, like, 90% of LA had zero drive-by shootings. You know, these are all taking place in a very tightly concentrated area that is as dangerous as, you know, the worst part of El Salvador before, you know, the current president took over, I guess. And so, you know, people were looking at that and they just sort of, you know, the white people who had moved out to the suburbs to get away from all this, you know, they just didn't want to hear about it. They just were like, keep it over there.

I don't care. And unless it starts to spill out, like, just have the police deal with it. And it gets to the point where, again, you get up to 1991, 1989, 1999, 1991. And then culminating with the L.A. riots, you know, you have, like, I think New York City today. Or I'll use Los Angeles because I know that one. Los Angeles had like 350 murders last year. It had like 1,800 murders in 1991. I mean, insane levels of crime.

And it was, you know, if you look at like the crime statistics, I know people always talk about that, you know, you can look at it and say, well, yeah, like it's only half. I mean, it's certainly disproportionate to the population, like the number of murders committed by blacks. Half is a lot when you're only 14% of the population or whatever it is. But, you know, it's a very different problem. than the other half, which are like white or Latino murders or something.

Because, you know, like the white murders in the country, it's like, all right, this guy over in Great Falls, Montana, found out his wife was cheating on him with this guy, and he killed him. And then over here in like, you know, Northern California, there was this white guy who got into a fight at a bar and killed the guy, whatever. It's this distributed thing. Whereas, you know, and it can't be addressed or solved with the same tools that you need when you have this very tight, concentration of just total chaos, which is what the black neighborhoods had become by the early 90s. And you get to like, you know, 92, like the LA riots really were like a kind of a last straw kind of moment where people had just had enough. And then when you get up to the second kind of last straw following right on that, on the heels of that was, I think people don't today don't

recognize how important this was that, you know, the whole country's attention was glued to the O.J. Simpson in trial while that was going on. Everybody was watching that. And when it became this situation where you had this guy who obviously killed these people who gets off because, you know, one of the investigators may have made a comment or something at some point in the past, unrelated to him, when that happened, and then after the trial, when he gets acquitted and you have the news cameras out in front of the courthouse and you have just crowds of black people out there cheering. We won. We won. I really think that was like a major breaking point where people were like, you know what, we're not dealing with this anymore. And you saw a huge turn, you know. I mean,

I think if you go back to like 1985, there was something like 450,000 people incarcerated in the United States. And it's like two million now. And when you count like the people who were on probation and parole and in some level of the criminal justice system, I mean, you know, it's a, I mean, crime has gone down for a reason and it's gone down because we you know this might be an ugly thing to say but i mean it went down because uh we you know put a good percentage of uh the worst people in the black underclass in prison or in some level of the criminal justice system i mean that's what happened and it's unfortunate i guess like because there's a lot of downstream effects that you know that that causes that are not good but you know this was a response to a crisis you know again you had five

drive-by shootings a day in L.A. over the three years before the 92 riots. And it kind of stayed that way, like all the way up until, I guess, like Trayvon, you know, or maybe Ferguson, when everything started to change again. And you start to get this 1960s kind of version of how these things are approached. And, you know, I hope that we don't have to go through the same process they went through in the 60s, which is that everything just falls apart for 20 or 25 years and gets worse and worse. And the city has become unlivable until finally people, you know, decide to throw out John Lindsay and replace them with Ed Koch or Giuliani or something. But, you know, yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be interesting to see how that does develop, actually. Well, I think, yeah, the one thing I'm very interested in seeing going forward is just,

just how black and Jewish, how they relate to one another still. I mean, Greenblatt, Jonathan Greenblatt, the president of the ADL, I don't say this because I don't like, I say this because it's just obvious.

He's not the smartest person who ever has headed the ADL. His tweets are just insane. I mean, the guy is, he's pandering to the black community. I've seen many, many where we're in this together. We're in the same boat. And then you just see one comment after another, who own those boats talking about the slave ships?

Who own those boats? Who own those boats? Why were the slave markets closed on Saturday? And it's like, well, I mean, if a billionaire black man is asking questions and then you have Dave Chappelle go on, you know, Saturday Live and say there's two words, you can. can't say together. Well, I mean, it's interesting. Because if those two groups start going to war with one another again, and of course, this is only on social media now, which is probably a good thing, because it's not in

the streets yet. But it's, the future is going to be very interesting when it comes to those two groups. Yeah. Because one of those. just going to say that back in this in the 60s of one of the things I was just going to say and I'll be I'll be quick with this one is that I suspect that the loss of Jewish support for the black movement around 67 68 is like that was a critical part of their political support that they really needed to keep like a Nixon from going ham on them and stuff and so that's one of the things that I could see happening if there is like a big break then we could maybe go back you know in a direction. of addressing this as a law enforcement problem and kind of like more of a 1990s version of addressing black crime in the cities and stuff because they you know the the the pretty much unanimous support of politically active Jews for the black cause I mean it's I think that's a

critical element of the support they need to keep the rest of the society from you know fixing the problem in a very different way yeah correct and if they lose that support now and it seems wherever any major institution you look at any major industry, there are Jews at the top of it. That money, if that money and that support stops going into the black community, then we are, like I say, the only word I can use is interesting because it's very hard at this point to try to figure out exactly how that would play out considering so much of our lives are and so much debate is online now instead of

at City Hall, on the steps of City Hall or in the streets in a march. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I guess the last thing I'll say is I think that like, you know, black people in America right now are really kind of on the edge of a precipice, I think, in a way that they haven't been, you know, really ever, just because, you know, the changing demographics of this country, you know, due to immigration, I mean, there's a lot of people, and pretty soon enough,

probably a majority of people in this country and certainly a majority of people in the cities who don't care about slavery. They don't care about Jim Crow. They don't identify any of that with themselves. You see it in Los Angeles specifically where, you know, you have black what used to be black neighborhoods like back in the early 90s, Compton and stuff. Those are all Latino neighborhoods now. And that transition was not a peaceful one. The Latino gangs drove those people out.

They fire bombed apartment buildings. They were just random murders of black people trying to drive them out. And, you know, the black gangs and the black community in general doesn't have the numbers or the organization that the Latinos do. And so they got, you know, when all of the Latino on black violence started to subside around like the early to mid 2000. people looked at that as like they celebrated as a victory, but it was really just because that job of cleansing had been accomplished by that point,

you know, and so it died down. There's, you know, you have situations where these things would be going on and local, Latino local politicians in L.A. would be providing cover for these Latino gangs that were driving these people out. They were,

you know, there was a situation in L.A. where there was this hospital. Actually, it's a reverse situation of like the thing that, you know, people were complaining about in the 60s, black people were complaining about in the 60s, which is you had a neighborhood that used to be black, and there was a hospital there,

and most of the employees there were black because they were from the community. Over a pretty short period of time, that neighborhood became predominantly Latino, still a bunch of black people working at the hospital, and the Latinos there, the Latino community successfully used affirmative action laws to say there needs to be more Latinos here. So they used it to drive black people out of these good jobs. And so, you know, I mean, for all the problems that, you know, black people have had to face over the, over the years in America, when you got up to the 1960s, for all the trouble and all the problems, you know, white America as a whole, you know, had kind of come around to the idea that like, okay, there needs to be some kind of a resolution of this. Like, you know, these people have been enslaved.

they have been second-class citizens and, you know, we got to do something here. Like, something needs to be done. People, like, really were ready for that conversation in the 1960s. In the America that's coming, you know,

that are, nobody is going to care about that. Nobody will care. They can, they can, you know, talk about historical oppression or whatever it is. And, you know, I think maybe actually,

like the, maybe the tipping point, like something you can, probably look for is when you start to see a lot of Jews really start to take the side of Latinos when they come into conflict with blacks. Because that's sort of like sticking your finger in the wind and seeing which way it's blowing, you know. And so, you know, I feel bad for, you know, I feel bad for black people in this country right now in a lot of ways because, you know, I look at something like Wakanda forever or Black Lives Matter and it's so ridiculous in so many ways. But these people

are in like a pretty desperate situation and their future does not look. good. And, you know, I look at those things as like almost last gasps of an attempt at creating some kind of a coherent identity and, you know, certain amount of political cohesion that will help them kind of withstand and, you know, just help them survive in a country that is going to be completely defined by ethnic politics again, you know, where people who are unrelated to any of our history of race relations in this country are really running the show. And it's not going to be, you know, it's not going to be very good. I mean, you talk about the great migration.

Over the last 15, 20 years or so, there's been a reverse great migration. You know, the blacks are getting driven out of the cities because of rising real estate prices and everything. And they're moving back to the south. And in some ways, I mean, that's kind of a, you know, it's kind of a tragic thing, right? You have like that, what's that, midnight train to Georgia, you know, that old song. And it's about like this black dude who went out to, I think. like Los Angeles, Hollywood or something, and just couldn't really make it. And so he ended up going back to Georgia, taking the midnight train back to Georgia.

And it was kind of a sad song. And that's happening, like on mouse now, you know. And so, yeah, it'll be very interesting. It'll be very interesting to see how it develops, but I'm not optimistic. Plug anything you want. Oh, I don't have anything. You come on. I mean, I have a podcast, Martyr Made.

focuses primarily on like broader historical topics. And then I've got a substack, martyrmade.substack.com, where I talk about things that are more current usually. So, yeah, sorry. I don't like self-promotion. I'm not good at it. I need to get better at it. I've been doing this long enough that you think I would be a lot better at it.

But Darrell, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thanks, man. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Cagnano show. I'm here with Darrell Cooper once again. How are you doing, Darrell? Good, man. It's always good to be here with you.

Thanks. Well, thank you for joining me today. This is a week where an announcement came down that, for those of us who actually know who runs foreign policy and who influences foreign policy, it was a huge announcement that Victoria Nuland was stepping down as, I think was she undersecretary? Yeah. People like her, you know, their titles come and go, but she's sort of one of those undead creatures in Washington that no matter who's Republican, Democrat, Dick Cheney, you know, Joe Biden doesn't matter. Like she kind of always hangs around and they maintain that consistency of policy over the course of, you know, many administrations that has not ended well. And, you know, hopefully the fact that she's step. stepping down. I mean, she's going to land on her feet. Don't worry about that. I'm sure she'll have a nice gig at Harvard or something soon, but it may signal that the policy that she's headed up in Eastern Europe since, you know, she was hired to her current position in 2013, 2014, when Maidan happened, that maybe we're deciding that we've got to accept defeat on that front and move on. So hopefully that's the case. Yeah, when you see someone like her step down, someone who's such a permanent fixture in what you would call the administrative state, really. What's your reaction? Well, you know, there's a lot of sort of musical chairs going on with things like this.

And so you have to look at who she's replaced by. And, you know, the guy that they brought in, I don't know a whole lot about him except that he used to work for Strobe Talbot. and you know strobe talbot was one of clinton's main russia guys back in the 90s and he you know he's not a he's not an ideologue like someone like like victorian newland and her set is like with regard to russia he's more pragmatic he was always somebody though who uh you know when he he may have thought something was a bad idea or he was pushing for something he thought was a good idea but when clinton told him no you're going to go do this and endorse it fully and push it on everybody else, he would follow orders and go do it. So, you know, he, all things told, I'd rather have a pragmatist like that

in there than somebody like Newland. But yeah, it's hard to read these things because, again, like, you know, Newland's not leaving the foreign policy scene. She's going to go get hooked up at Brookings or CSIS and, you know, teach classes at Georgetown about how we ought to conduct our foreign policy. So, you know, it's not some giant victory, but as far as the immediate policy with regard to Russia and Ukraine, it hopefully signals, you know, an improvement in that area. When you look at all of this, I was listening to Scott Ritterer the other day was saying he believes it as many as 400,000 Ukrainian men could be dead. And what they're judging that by as they're looking at obituaries.

They're counting obituaries for the last two years that have appeared. He says another 100,000 could be missing. Do those numbers seem in the ballpark of what you've been looking at? Yeah, obviously it's hard to say. But, you know, when I look at, you know, I think these numbers came from Ukraine or, if not, Ukraine, U.S. officials. But one of the two, that the average age of a Ukrainian infantry, men on the field right now is 43 years old. I mean, you know, that's like Germans in February of 1945 numbers, you know, because, you know, again, it doesn't mean that everybody on the battlefield is

43. Some of them are 25, but they got 55 and 60 year old guys out there now. And if you're scraping the bottom of the barrel like that, then, you know, a country of pre-war was it 35, 40 million people or something, and you're scraping the bottom of the barrel like that, then you're hurting for manpower, no question about it. And you'd have to kill a whole hell of a lot of Ukrainian men to get them to that point. So, you know, whether it's 400,000 or 500,000 or it's a lot. It's a hell of a lot. Go back to Maidan. And what is your take on it? What's your take on why a coup took place why the um you know everybody wants to talk about the house everybody wants to talk about snipers here there i've read i've read it all to me it's always the why so why you know i

i read this anecdote from uh the former cia director and defense secretary bob gates um who you know obviously is a swamp creature but uh relative to his colleagues you know is more sensible, I think, than most of the people who've been in those positions for quite a while. And he was asked about our difference in approach toward Russia and the Soviet Union versus our approach to China over the years. And this was, you know, a little, this was a handful of years ago before a lot of people have started to talk about, you know, our need to start focusing on China more. But, you know, he said it was very interesting because you go back to 1989 and you have these two communist powers and one of them agrees to let their empire go voluntarily, agrees to have a

bloodless democratic revolution essentially, agrees to end the Cold War without a fight. The other side had Tiananmen Square and, you know, I know there's sort of some revisionism going on about that and I haven't really sorted sorted through any of that yet, but there's something going on in 1989 in China that was, you know, trying to put pressure on that regime. and they squashed it. And from that point on, you know, we've pretty much been treating China like a good buddy and somebody we can trust and work with and so forth. And we've been just like rabid dogs when it comes to Russia, at least after they stopped

taking orders from us in the 1990s. And so Gates was asked about this. He says, you know, it is interesting. He said, if you go back to like World War II, this is hard for us to even really imagine these days because we're just, we've grown. grown up in the empire, you know. When the OSS was stood up, when America came into the war, like we had no presence overseas. We had no intelligence presence overseas.

We had nothing to the point where Dulles was actually bringing in recent immigrants from like Holland and stuff to ask them to draw diagrams of like where the port is and stuff. That's where our, you know, our foreign intelligence presence was at the time. And so, you know, you start out like that. We have to stand up a Soviet Union desk at this new intelligence agency or, you know, we have to beef up the Soviet desk at the State Department. We have to build out these institutions now to deal with these things that are emerging. And he said when we started doing that with China, the people that we hired to fill all the seats at the China desk, whether it's State Department or DOD or the intelligence agencies, mostly like overwhelmingly they were the children of missionaries who had spent a lot of time in

China and they like China they like Chinese people they like Chinese culture and they sort of saw their role as you know facilitating peaceful mediation between their country and this country that they had a lot of respect for with regard to the Soviet Union when we started doing that And even before that, when we had like, you know, our diplomatic corps in the Russian Empire before the Soviet Union, small as it was, wasn't, you know, we filled that up almost entirely with non-Russian refugees who had come over who did not like Russians. They did not like, you know. And they saw their role as helping the United States fight this beast or using the United States to fight this beast. And that, you know, Gates said that when you start, you know, bureaucracies have a lot of sort of, just inertia behind them. And so when you start out with a certain attitude, a certain approach,

it stays that way for, you know, unless you have some sort of conscious cleanup of it, it's going to stay that way because everybody there's like it. You hire somebody new. They get integrated into that culture. The old people retire. You bring in new people, and it just maintains that culture and that approach. And, you know, I think that that's something we've really seen pick up, you know, in spades since the Soviet Union fell, or really since, like, I guess the 80s is when we started taking in, like, a lot of refugees and then in the 90s, like a whole lot where, you know, if you, if you, and not only refugees, just foreign nationals and, you know, recent immigrants and stuff. If you look back at the 1990s, for example,

like whether you're talking about Madeline Albright, whether you're talking about the chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the mid-90s under Clinton, General Salakashvili, just across the board, you see the same thing you saw during the first Trump impeachment hearing. It's just one emigree after another from Eastern Europe or from that region going up and you're like, you know, you kind of realize that these people are, they're bringing their priors with them when they come to the United States and join up for that. And, you know, you can understand what, look, I mean, if you need somebody to, to work intelligence or, or in your diplomatic core for, you know, Nigeria, the child of a Nigerian immigrant is probably a good candidate to do that. You know, they understand the culture and can bring that to it. But there's downsides to it, you know, especially when the other side really comes with a chip on its shoulder. I guess listening to what you just says, some people could say, well, because they chose people who were more sympathetic to China, maybe that's why we have so many China problems now. Yeah, I mean, for sure.

Although I would say our China problems really didn't start until, you know, the late 90s or so. I mean, when we decided to let him into the WTO and just kind of threw that open, you know, before that, and this really goes to like U.S. foreign policy as a whole, you know, if you go back to even the 80s, I'll say up through the 80s even, you know, you still had this sort of, this sort of old school wasp attitude, post-warlike kind of wasp attitude, where, you know, you had guys like James Baker, You had these people who had enough heft in gravitas, not just in Washington, but just sort of in general, that they could control the fanatics and hold them back a little bit and overrule them a bit. You know, you get up into the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, and a lot of those people really started to fade away to the point where you get up to the Bush administration. And, like, you know, our foreign policy is just totally hijacked by a bunch of second and third generation neocons.

that somebody like George Cannon never would have even allowed into his office, you know? And so that sort of consistent hand on the steering wheel leadership at the very, very, very top level has sort of evaporated, you know, it really doesn't exist anymore. There is like a, there's a ruling class, but it's sort of amorphous, and people come and go, and you can come in and be cast out. It's not this, you know, it's not the sons of Cincinnati anymore, you know, the children of the American Revolution or something. And so, you know, there's nobody who has like a real sense of proprietorship over the country and feels like, you know, by thinking about the long-term future of the country, they're looking after the long-term future of their own grandkids and great-grandkids in a very real sense because this is their legacy that they're going to inherit.

You know, now it's there's nobody like that for the most part. And so it's just a big free-for-all, you know, and it's whichever interest group is, you know, the best organized and the best funded and the most ruthless and just the best at getting their way through all the various levers that we provide for that, that they tend to get their way. And it's not a conspiracy necessarily. It's not something that there's this sort of deep, seated sort of conspiracy against Russia that keeps us in this belligerent attitude toward them that, I mean, it's that, When I say there's not some conspiracy, I mean, it's not something that, like, pervades the whole government.

It's not like the regime is like this. It's that the people who feel that way, they know how to work the system. They're extremely well organized. They're extremely well-funded, you know, especially since Putin throughout all the billionaires. I mean, are a lot of those oligarchs. Those guys have been spending their money in London and New York to get, you know, NATO in our countries to remain belligerent toward Putin ever since they got run out of town. So, you know, there's a lot of money behind it, a lot of organization. And then you have on top of that sort of the long-term institutional approach that, you know, I just, that Gates described.

So. Well, that's what part of the being the manager, being under a managerial regime does, right? You can have these little special interest groups, unelected special interest groups, you know, people who, you know, they can be fired. But if they do their job well, they can be there for, for a very, very, very. long time, even after the administration's come and go, they stay around. And you can have these where it's not really a conspiracy. All it is is there's one group inside the government that's like, okay, this is what we want to do. We have the power to do it. So let's concentrate. Let's work with this NGO, whomever. And let's institute a coup and put our guy into place. And you can have, you know,

you can have audio on YouTube with the proof where they're like, oh, what was a EU going to say? Well, fuck the EU. I mean, that's what we get, right? When we have a managerial regime, we can have two or three people who decide, let's foment a war on the other side of the planet. And there you go. Yeah. And, you know, I think maybe in one of your conversations, with Thomas, something he said, he said that the American government is a machine that has been built, was built to fight the Cold War, right? And, you know, and I would say the Cold War and World War II, because if you go back to, like, December 6th, 1941, and look at the size and the function of the federal government, it was 99% of what we have now. Like, it was 1% of what we have now. And so it grew up in that environment, in the environment of total war,

and global conflict with the Soviet Union. And that's not, that's just not something you can necessarily shut off. I'm doing a series on my substack right now about the history of slavery, going back a long ways and taking it up to the lead up to the American Civil War. And I was talking about the Spanish and the Portuguese and how if you're gonna,

when you wanna talk about the approach they took when they came over into the new world any of the other places that they ended up. You know, these people had been in war for hundreds and hundreds of years, for 600 years. They had been at continual war against the Moors, pushing them out of Liberia. And so it was built into their culture. It was built into the very way that, like, the incentives that led to certain people being promoted and receiving sort of, you know, and you can't just turn something like that off. And so we have a, we have a government that's built to fight a war like that. And, you know, it's, I mean, look, Samuel Huntington did not

have to be a genius to know that after the Soviet Union fell, we were going to go look for another enemy. And he was probably going to be Islam. You know, he called that one. Islam proved to be sort of an unworthy adversary in a certain, at least for our purposes. And so we, you know, we sort of move back to trusty old Russia. It really seems like that, that Russia can be made into the enemy at any given time. Because when you had a standoff for so long, even before that, under the Tsar, there were issues. You can go to the Civil War and the argument could be made

that the North window one without Russia. It seems like Russia is definitely a whipping boy, is someone that, especially a country that's so resource rich, that you're, if you're in a perpetual war state, they're an easy enemy. They're not, they're slav. They're not, a lot of people would say they're not like us. They're not like Westerners. And yeah, there is, there are all of these riches there. And yeah, it just, it seems like it's the perfect, the perfect country to pick on, especially when you're, when you've done so much to basically defeat and demoralize the countries that surround it, that you can insinuate yourselves

into those countries and basically surround them, much like they did with Iran. Yeah, and, you know, you talk about the money that's there. I think that really gets kind of at the, at the deepest part of, let's say the most proximate cause of why we've taken the approach we have since Putin came to power. You know, if you look at, you know, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 91, most people out there probably know things were not good in the former Soviet world, especially in Russia, you know, and you just put that in some kind of context. I mean, you know, in 2020, 2021 with COVID, with record numbers of people,

in America committing suicide, record numbers of people dying from deaths of despair, alcohol and drugs and things like that. The life expectancy in America dropped. It dropped by about six months or something, six, eight months, I think. And that's a big deal. That's a very traumatic thing to happen. You look at all the death that's happening. Record numbers of suicides and deaths of despair is no joke.

People feel that. It affects the culture in a very deep way. The life expectancy in Russia, you know, from 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down to 1995, just six years, dropped about a decade, a little over a decade, actually. You know, and when you look at the distribution of who was affected, it wasn't that, you know, a lot more babies were dying at birth. It wasn't that a lot of women were dying. Women life expectancy, female life expectancy was not affected all that much. And the people who were already like 50 or 60 years old, like theirs wasn't affected too much. It was pretty much all just hyper concentrated in that group of men like, you know, 15 to 40 years old.

And they weren't dying of, you know, because of an increase of cancer rates. Like it the life expectancy drop 10 years because of malnutrition, alcoholism, drug addiction, and violence. And so you think about, again, like what I just said about COVID and the deaths of despair over here, which are all at records for it to drop six, eight months, for it to drop a decade. I mean, you need, you know, it was a nightmare. It was an absolute nightmare for these people. You know, you, and when you, you know, there's a, there's an element to it that's sort of like Germany after the First World War, you know, people, even people who are sort of pro-Russia and, you know, against the U.S. approach there, they don't necessarily like this analogy because, you know, the end result is that they end up where the Germans are ending up. But I think it's a solid analogy in a lot of ways, you know, if you think about how. you know, the Germans fight this long, hard war, and people can, you know, historians can debate how the whole thing ended and whether they were stabbed in the back or lied to, whatever,

but the fact is, like, they certainly felt that way. And they weren't just being bitchy about it. Like, they really felt that way. Like, and they had good reason. Even if you don't agree, you have to, like, listen to their reasoning and, and admit it's consistent, right? that they felt that they had agreed to lay down their arms. Churchill kept the British Navy cutting off their food. You know, tons of Germans were starving to death, and then they were basically forced knife at their throat to sign just an unbelievably punitive treaty.

And so, you know, you have the hyperinflation in 23, and you go into the 20s, and, you know, you have to try to put yourself in like, in this place where you're a, observing this happen to your own society and how it would radicalize and affect you, right? Where, you know, the middle class due to the inflation just got completely and totally wiped out. I mean, you know, people out there who listed to your show know what hyperinflation is, and they know that the middle classes are the ones who get annihilated by that.

You know, the poor, they have nothing and they're in debt and their debts are worth less now. So in a way, they're better off. the rich people have international connections, connections to international currencies, they own hard assets and other things, and they sort of ride the inflation wave up to a degree. But the middle class who has their money in annuities and savings, when all of a sudden you've got to go to the store to buy a loaf of bread with a wheelbarrow full of cash, those people just lost everything, like immediately. And you literally had like respectable middle class German women who were having to resort

to turning their homes into brothels because they just had no other way to feed their children or feed themselves. And this was epidemic across the country, you know, and you have to, again, think about like how, if that were going on, especially if you felt like the reason you're in this position is because you were tricked and misled and that you could have kept fighting if you knew they were going to do this and you would have, but that they lied to you. You know, it would be extremely radicalizing. And so, you know, if you, if you want to follow that analogy further, I mean, shoot, after the First World War, we sheared off, you know, what 15% or whatever it is of the German population. And from the moment, you know, from the moment that happened, the new German government,

even the Weimar government, was expressing a lot of concern about the fate of those people. because, you know, you have a country like Poland that hasn't been a country for a long time, and now it's a country. And so you're going to have this upsurge of nationalist feeling and, you know, and all this kind of thing. And that's fine. That's totally natural. But, you know, how are they going to look at the German minority over in the West? And it wasn't necessarily good.

Same with Czechoslovakia and other places. And so eventually, like, the Germans got to the point of, like, we got to get these people back. And I mean, that's exactly what happened with Russia. You know, even Boris Yeltsin, our total, you know, just puppet throughout the 90s, like even the very, very early 90s, and we were trying to negotiate the withdrawal of Russian forces from Estonia and Latvia, things like that. You know, even Yeltsin, who, again, we controlled like a marionette, was resistant. He was like, we got to wait until I can verify that the Russian people who live over there who woke up one day and now they're foreigners in a minorities in a foreign country. I got to make sure that they're okay and that they're going to be treated okay. And from the beginning, I mean, there were signs of trouble, you know, in almost all of these countries.

You know, in Estonia, for example, they started passing citizenship laws that made it very, very difficult for like native Russian speakers and ethnic Russians to get citizenship. I think to this day, there's a, there's a large percentage of the Russian population still can't vote or anything like that. And you can say that's like, you know, sort of a, that's maybe a bit of a minor inconvenience. But when you look at what's happening in Ukraine and what's been going on since 2014 and to a certain degree since 2004, you know, you can see why Yeltsin would have been concerned. And Putin finally, now that Russia's back on its feet and able to actually do something, has done something because they never stop considering those Russians their responsibility and their people, you know. And rather than respect that and understand how, you know, a country might feel about that, we've sort of used those people as foils to to, to, to, to, you know, drive up the intensity of nationalist feelings in the post-Soviet countries and to direct them against Russia, you know? And you read about this in, like in 2004 during the

Orange Revolution, which obviously we had a hand in as well. Before that, you go back even 2003, and you look at polls in even Western Ukraine, you look at polls about how people feel about Russia and Russians. And it's fine. It's, you know, a large majority's, uh, totally approved. They're everything good. 2004 comes along and you're going to have a revolution like that. You got to have some energy to drive it and where's that going to come from? And you start to see all of these NGO funded and led media outlets that popped up and everything else, start putting out a lot of propaganda demonizing the Russian people, calling them the problem in Ukraine and They're the reason we're having these issues and so forth.

And that really started to pick up. And, you know, now, 2024, 20 years later, you know, the kids who were who were in elementary school, when that started happening, that change in attitude and approach started happening, you know, they're the guys who joined as of battalion later on. And, yeah, it's, you know, it's not good. I mean, you know, and the thing is actually you go ahead and redirect this because I'll keep going. Okay, well, let's go back to the 90s then. To me, everything I've read about what was happening there, it was basically a looting operation. Okay, so now this empire falls, essentially no one's in charge except the oligarchs, and they're just looting and to the point, I know I was reading about 90s,

94 and 95, people are buying stuff with coupons. Their money isn't even in existence. And basically all of the wealth is being driven out of the country. That's what you understand, right? 100%. Yeah. And that was happening in Ukraine as well, by the way. And the difference between the two countries is Russia got its Putin and Ukraine never got its Putin.

And so those oligarchs still run the country. country. You know, they were running it when the war started. They were running it when Maidan happened. They're still running it now, although a lot of them, you know, the bulk of their wealth and assets were tied up in the industrial east that is now controlled by Russia. So, you know, that's probably one of the reasons they're continuing to feed their young men into the wood chipper even past the point where it makes much sense to any outsiders. But, yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you know, you can kind of see how, see it working when, in this, there's another, here's another parallel.

well, the Germany in the 20s, is, you know, people who were in Russia, in Ukraine, who had access to, you know, like if you had access to a foreign financial institution that was willing to back you, I mean, you know, you could buy up the whole country. I literally got to that point where, you know, seven oligarchs in the mid-90s, seven just, there were a bunch of them, but seven oligarchs owned 58% of the entire Russian. economy, which is an insane number, you know. And Ukraine, you know, very similar. And in both of those countries, you know, we don't have to go too far down this road. But, you know, in both of those countries, the vast majority of the big oligarchs were all Russian and Ukrainian Jews, right? Which

these are people who had cousins and relatives in other countries. And they were able to sort of draw on those resources at a time when there was a kind of free-for-all within the country itself. And, you know, when you have a situation, again, where you go back to Germany, where the middle-class, respectable middle-class women are having to, you know, sell their bodies to put food on their table. And people with foreign connections and foreigners themselves are not just getting rich, but I mean becoming just fabulously insanely wealthy by looting your economy. That starts to draw up a certain amount of resentment. It's very fortunate in a lot of ways that you know, you haven't seen so much of that in Russia and Ukraine specifically with regard to the Jews because,

you know, it's something that you could have seen happening, you know. Like in Russia, you know, those seven oligarchs who own 58% of the entire economy, six of them were Jewish. And when Putin came along and sat the oligarchs down and told them that, you know, look, you guys are going to stay billionaires, you're going to keep your businesses, you're going to do all these things. But you're not part of politics anymore. Like, that's not a, you're your businessman and that's it. And if you are okay with that, then we're friends and you're rich.

If you're not okay with that, then you're going to have a problem with me. And the ones who fled the country to New York and London and Tel Aviv were primarily those non-Russian oligarchs. And, you know, it's a, it's, it kind of goes to, you think about somebody like Bill Browder, you know. It was a guy who was working with Sergei Magnitsky, the biggest, to want to talk about like the biggest scam, just, it's mind-blowing, like, how well this operation has worked. because that guy, that guy was a straight-up criminal, stealing from the Russian government. And Sergei Magnitsky was his accountant who was helping him do that. I don't, you know, the conditions in Russian prisons are probably bad.

And, you know, it's not good that Magnitsky goes in there and ends up dying of, you know, sort of, you could say negligence. But, you know, who might have talked when you look at the condition of our prison? and, you know, the conditions we throw people into. So, but the point is, like, you know, Browder was one of these guys. You know, people descended on that country like vultures, and they went and they found local agents that they could work with,

people who were happy to exploit everyone around them and do this. And, you know, whoever they could find was the most unscrupulous, you know, people around. It was the most ruthless people around. You know, there's people, like these oligarch, guys like Kodorkovsky, who, you know, is held up as sort of some type of a human rights icon, a dissident. That guy is a gangster who, if he had, you know, lived the life he led in the 90s in Texas instead of Russia, they would have put him in the gas chamber.

You know, he would have gotten the death penalty for that. And, you know, but it was a great gravy train. I mean, you have like a giant, giant country with resources galore. And every big financial institution across the West is just making huge amounts of money, you know, pulling that wealth out of the country. And in one country, you know, a guy stepped in who put a stop to that. Ukraine is what Russia would have looked like if Putin never came along. And the entire place was still, I mean, you look at like the people who were appointed as governors of the different provinces in Ukraine after the Maidan revolution. It was a whole bunch of the oligarchs, you know, often in control of the zones where a lot of their particular industries were, you know, the rest were like U.S. State Department assets like, like Sakashvili and stuff. But yeah, I mean, you know, Putin cut the gravy train off and that was his great sin. And we've not forgiven him for it. And, you know, I think we had this pipe dream. People like Victoria Newland had this pipe dream that maybe we could.

We could open them back up and maybe bring them back down a notch or two so that we could get the gravy train flowing again But you know, it's a very like the people in Russia they remember what the 90s were like They remember what it was like and their parents at least remember what it was like and they know that Whether they there's you know whether they agree with the Ukraine war whether they like Putin or anything like that What they know is ever since Putin came along long, the way things were in the 90s, it's not like that anymore, you know, and they can live normal lives in their country. And, you know, those people are going to stick by their leader when that's the case, you know, because they know the downside. And, you know, especially as time has

gone on and our belligerence toward them and really our, I mean, our hatred towards them, you know, and like we see things over here that sort of go in and out of the news, like when, you know, some Russian tennis stars getting banned from tennis tournaments and, you know, Dostoevsky's getting pulled from the curriculum of some Harvard class or something. Like, we see that and it's like, oh, it's so stupid and whatever. That stuff is plastered on the six o'clock news in Russia, and everybody sees it, and they think, this is crazy. These people are crazy. Like, they really hate us and seek our destruction. And, you know, and again, I think that most Americans don't naturally feel that way.

But the people, the group who do feel that way, you know, they're very well organized, very well funded and they know what they're doing. So is it safe to say that those people who the gravy train stopped, that Putin put a stop to the gravy train in the 90s were probably behind everything that was happening in 2013 and 2014. You know, they supported it, you know, financially. They, they back the think tanks that employ the people like Victoria Newland when they are out of government.

And they exert a lot of influence in that sense. Like, I don't think that they're, you know, that, that, you know, Roman Abramovich is meeting with the president or the prime minister of England and sort of giving him marching orders or anything like that. But they exert the influence that they have. and given the fact that the U.S. and NATO sort of foreign policy approach or Eastern Europe, Russia approach is kind of already geared in that direction. Like really, they're just giving it sort of an extra push. You know, it doesn't need much more of a push. But it's definitely a part of it. I mean,

you're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars, maybe trillions of dollars that got pulled out of that country. They got pulled out of Russia. I mean, we hear about the big ones like a Brahma who left the country with $40 billion or whatever, but there are hundreds of these people, ultimately. And, you know, and that's not counting, like the money that got siphoned out to Western financial institutions as all this was going on. So, I mean, you're talking about a massive chunk of the Russian economy that was just straight up looted. And, you know, that's a, it's a hard thing to give up, you know. And when you have a lot of, when you're on that gravy train and you've got a lot of influence with the United States government, you're going to,

you're going to try to pull that lever to get it to act on your behalf. You know, it's always been that way. So the narrative when the, when Russia invaded Ukraine was, one of the narratives was that in the Donbass region, ethnic Russians had been slaughtered since 2014, hear numbers anywhere from 12,000 to 32,000 is, what do you know about that? I mean, how is it happening? Were they bombing them? What were what was going on? Yeah, a lot of artillery mortars, things like that primarily. As far as I know, aircraft weren't primarily doing it. But, but yeah, I mean, they were just sort of indiscriminately targeting civilian areas and laughing about it. You know, you had Poroshenko who, you know, gave that speech and he was bragging about how Russian children are going to be hiding in

basements or Donbass children are going to be hiding in basements, you know, to avoid our artillery while our kids are going to eat breakfast and go to school. And it's just, you know, that we have a word for that when, you know, Arabs do it or something. It's called terrorism. And, you know, if you look at the immediate aftermath of the Maidan coup, there was essentially a nationwide pogrom against Russians, you know, against Russian speakers. And by, you know, again, a lot of the, you know, I've actually read like some of the memoirs of these hardcore as-of types, you know, there's a few of them in English. And you kind of feel for these guys in a way when you read them, even if you think that,

you know, it's sad that they're, you know, puppets of a regime that really does not care about them or their country at all. and that they're you know they're they're they're ignorant or whatever for for allowing themselves to be used that way but these are you know these are hardcore like right wing patriots in their country and in the context of their lives this is the way that it makes sense for them you know and um so when when you know 2014 happened uh i mean you you know the famous ones you know with a few dozen people getting burned alive in the trade building in Odessa. But that was something that was happening all over the place. People getting kidnapped because they were ethnic Russians who were considered,

you know, politically unreliable in this new regime. And you're talking about hundreds or thousands of people getting kidnapped and abused and tortured and killed. And again, we sort of, you know, we sort of look at that. If it gets mentioned at all over here, it sort of gets mentioned as like, well yeah there was a violent there was a revolution and revolutions are crazy and bad things happened and you know in any revolution and that's true enough but you know this is uh if if you look at that from the russian perspective you know from the perspective i was talking about earlier wherever since the early 90s somebody like yeltsin was expressing concern or the fate of ethnic russians in these countries whether the nationalist fervor was going to get out of control and make

their lives too hard. And just continually expressing concern about that over the years. And then watching that happen, watching all of those kidnappings and murders happen, watching Don Bass neighborhoods get, you know, bombarded by artillery, it can be very provocative, you know, and especially when you have larger geopolitical reasons to want to draw a line in the sand, you know, which obviously was, you know, was probably like the stuff I just talked about, the ethnic Russians, I mean, that probably gave the, you know, the sort of emotional impulse and it sort of drives the enthusiasm for the war effort and the cohesion in Russia maybe to a large

degree. But, I mean, make no mistake. They're in this war because they felt from a geopolitical standpoint like they had no choice. And, you know, and I think we knew that. And I think we put them in that position on purpose. I do think that probably we thought that they would continue to back down forever because we're America and they won't dare. We overestimated our own capability to cripple them and underestimated their capability to sustain a war. But we knew we were putting them in that position.

You know, the current CIA director was the ambassador to Russia back in 2008. And in January of 2008, he wrote this, you know, kind of famous now memo back to Condoleezza Rice, who was Secretary of State at the time called Nyet means Nyet. And in it, he, I mean, it's so, it's uncanny, like how specific he is about the whole thing. He says, look, I'm over here talking not just forget Putin. I'm talking to everybody in the upper echelons of Russian power, military people, civilians. It doesn't matter. they are unanimous that you know they put up with NATO expansion in the Baltics and these other places

you know because they had no choice because they couldn't do anything about it but that expanding NATO into Ukraine and expanding it into Georgia are absolute red lines that they just they simply cannot tolerate and they will be forced to act and then he said specifically he said their concern in Ukraine is that if like our movement to try to try to push that idea and try to get them in in there would lead to tension between the rush ethnic Russians in the east and the Ukrainians in the west who uh you know is that debate over whether they should join NATO or could they join NATO and everything uh heated up that it would lead to conflict between those two peoples and possibly even civil war and that and this is remarkable. He said, and that Russia would have to decide whether or not to intervene, which is the decision they do not want to have to face. And I mean, so the State Department, as Condoleez-Rice, gets that memo from her ambassador to Russia. And three months later, in March of that same year, just three months later at the NATO summit, we come out and say, yeah, Ukraine and

Georgia are going to join NATO. And so, you know, it didn't take long. obviously before the president in in Georgia, Saakashvili, because we had the short Georgia war over there. You know, Sakashvili is a guy who, you know, he's educated in the United States, literally like was over, like as part of a State Department program, you know, and he's, he's a Georgian, but for some reason after the Maidan coup, he got put in charge of the Odessa Oblast in Ukraine as the governor there for nobody can really explain why, but I think everybody knows why. And so, you know, Georgia had a problem when it came to joining NATO, which is you can't join NATO if you have an ongoing territorial dispute because it essentially would immediately

require NATO to get involved with that territorial dispute. So you have to clear that up first. And he had that problem up in Ossetia and the northern region of his country that had been sort of in an uneasy but steady peace since the early 90s where they sort of govern themselves with some autonomy and there were peacekeepers in there and stuff and it was fine you know it wasn't resolved but it was fine and uh he needed to clear that up and so he moved to clear it up and so the russians moved in and uh and kicked their ass and pushed them back and you know you had john mccain like telling us like he was literally john mccain was calling for us to uh to bomb the tunnels that the russians were driving their tanks and their armored vehicles through and like just attack the

Russians directly, just madman. For what? You know, to bring Georgia into Ukraine, something that doesn't improve, or rather, to bring Georgia into NATO, something that doesn't improve NATO's fighting ability,

its ability to extend power, nothing like that. Like, all Georgia would be to NATO is an out-of-the-way new obligation that really didn't provide any kind of countervailing benefits to NATO itself. And, you know, it kind of shows what the purpose of a lot of this NATO expansion is.

And, you know, if Georgia's not anywhere near the North Atlantic, you know, I asked a question when I was talking to a Latvian guy I know who's very, very anti-Russian pro-Ukrainian. And he denied that, you know, this, the NATO expansion was sort of targeting Russia, that it was directed at Russia. something that I think is sort of self-evidently silly, but I said, why don't, why aren't we trying to bring Brazil into NATO? Brazil is at least on the Atlantic, you know, but we're trying to bring Georgia into NATO. Why is that? Like, why is it only countries that are pushing in and surrounding this one country? And I think, you know, the answer is pretty obvious. And, you know, a certain point, you know, a leader of a country has to,

has to you know you come to Amir Shimer talks about this right where you can you know you can believe like Vladimir Putin can believe that the United States and NATO

don't want to attack Russia that they can expand into Ukraine and Georgia and everywhere else and that does not mean and probably and almost certainly doesn't mean that one day they're going to wake up and it's going to be June in 1941 again and American tanks are just Russian.

Like, he doesn't think that's going to happen, but he's responsible for national security in Russia. And so unless he can say for sure that's not going to happen, you know, you have to take steps to protect yourself. And we just haven't respected that at all. You know, we've treated Russia like al-Qaeda or something ever since, you know, the mid-2000s, as if none of their concerns, nothing they say. nothing, they worry. None of those have any legitimacy. Like, we're not concerned with what ISIS's

grievances are, what their security concerns are. Just kill them. That's it, right? And we've treated Russia that way. Like, just they have no legitimate interests or concerns whatsoever. And look, if you treat a country that's been around for a thousand years and has, you know, a strong sort of cultural base to build a sense of strong nationalism out of if it comes down to it, eventually they're going to buck and you know Russia bucked and and again hopefully with the with the resignation of Victoria Newland we may be coming to the end of at least this current cycle of that Obama sent Ukraine money Trump sent money and guns why why do you think Putin waited so long yeah so I mean look part of it is that Putin

I think it's clear that he genuinely wanted to find a peaceful resolution of this. You know, the Russians were coming to the table to negotiate the Minsk agreements in good faith. You know, let's work something out where, like, look, at the beginning of the war, the Russian military did move in for a while in 2014-15, and they routed the disorganized Ukrainian forces at the time. And they could have pushed them back, but they didn't. You know, they stopped their progress. And then they went back to Russia, you know, other than some special forces, little green men or whatever. And when, you know, they annex Crimea and the leaders in the separatist area, Donbass, they said, well, do us. Like, do us next.

You know, we want to be annexed to Russia. And Putin said, no. You know, we did it with Crimea because, like, that's just so strategically critical for us that, you know, we can't risk losing our Navy base and so forth. But no, he told them no. You literally had, okay, and this was what's really crazy, there's a great documentary that PBS series Frontline put out back in 2014. I think it's called, yeah, I can't remember,

but it's like a 35, 40-minute documentary about what's going on and what was going on in Ukraine at the time. And it's remarkably balanced. You would never see anything like this on like American, media, mainstream media today. It's quite balanced. And there's a scene where the reporter is in Kharkiv. And, you know, there's like an old woman and a crowd of people, but like an old woman specifically, who's on her knees. And she's crying and saying, Putin, please save us. Please save us from, you know, from the fascist. They hate us. They're going to kill us. Please save us. And so those people asked Putin to annex them and protect them.

And he said no because he thought like that was a bridge too far. And, you know, with the state that the Ukrainian military was in at that point, he easily could have done it. There's nothing Ukraine could have. There were a bunch of militias, you know, basically at that point. You know, they were totally disorganized. We hadn't trained them. We hadn't armed them. Anything like that.

And he said no. And so he spends years, you know, participating in these in these, Minsk negotiations, which would have kept the Donbass as part of Ukraine, but, you know, had a sort of semi-autonomous government system that would allow them to kind of do their own thing within the context of Ukrainian government to make sure that those people were protected from, you know, a Ukrainian government that was, like literally their parliament was full of people who had just led pogroms against Russians, like all across the country. And so, uh, you know, I think he just genuinely wanted to find a peaceful solution to the whole thing.

Maybe partly because, you know, I think Putin, and you saw this a little bit in that Tucker interview, I think he's probably, he seems like he's at the point now where he's done with the United States. Like there's nothing we can say that he can trust. There's no deal we can make that he would consider reliable anymore. But I think long term, he does still care about his relations with Europe. And he's looking forward to a possible future where, you know, Europe is something more than just an American base. And he can start to repair those relations, at least. And so maybe he pursued the Minsk Accords because of that.

But then, you know, you go through all that trouble, all that trouble. And then, you know, you see the, the German. chancellor as a French official like people coming out and saying I was all that was all BS like we didn't the whole Minsk thing was just to drag things out and to make sure Russia didn't move in and take over to give us time to build up the Ukrainian forces and get them armed and trained and could you imagine hearing that like as a Russian official I mean it yeah it's uh because I can I can and it would it would pretty much permanently break you know, my ability to take any negotiation with these people seriously again.

And so, you know, I think when he invaded, it's when it became clear to him that the peaceful solutions that he had been pursuing up to that point were just not going to happen. You know, if you look at the week or two right before, right before the invasion, from day to day to day, if you look at it, you know, there's a, there's a UN organization over there that was monitoring the ceasefire, right? They had a ceasefire where, you know, you could use small arms and stuff, and so the Ukrainians could do counterterrorism stuff with like small arms tactics and stuff, but you couldn't use a whole range of heavy weapons, artillery and mortars and all these other things. And there were violations, you know, one way and violations the other way occasionally, like, as like the Minsk agreements were being negotiated and so forth. And then in a couple weeks just prior to the invasion, you know, it goes from like, and they're all on one side. They're all coming from the Ukrainian side firing toward the Dombas.

It goes from like 30 violations, 80 violations the next day, 300 violations, 1,000 violations. I mean, they're just ramping this up and then Russia invades. And, you know, the sort of defenders of U.S. policy over there will try to convince me that that had nothing to do with Russia invading. But, you know, to me, like the default position should be to assume that it did. And that, you know, that along with a lot of other things, just led up to a point where Russia realized that if we wait another year, then they don't have to bring Ukraine into NATO. They're making it a NATO country right now, right before our eyes. They're not calling it that. They're not moving 40,000 U.S. troops in there yet or anything. But, you know, they're in every other way imaginable. They're essentially

turning this into what it would be if it was a NATO country. And they're going to get to a certain point where we're not going to be able to do anything about it, you know, because if it gets to a certain point and they continue to think that we're just not going to act. And then, you know, in a very short period of time, you know, an executive order comes down and 30,000 American troops are landed in Ukraine and take up residence in a base that we're calling permanent. Now Russia has to face the decision of whether to invade and attack American troops. Like, that's a whole different ballgame.

And I think he just decided that we can't wait any longer. We just can't, you know. And also actually around the same time, like a little bit beforehand, is when you had that attempted color revolution in Belarus. And that may have had something to do with, like, him just, you know, deciding, like, these, the Americans are never going to stop. Like, these people are just absolutely relentless. And at a certain point, you just, you know, even if you think you're going to get your ass kicked, sometimes you have no choice but to plant your feet and punch the bully in the mouth. They're not getting their ass kicked. They're, you know, unfortunately, I know that Putin immediately after the invasion started asking for, you know, hey, let's talk about this.

Let's find a peace. And it's just going on and on. And I think what we found out, I don't know, maybe you can correct me if you think I'm wrong on this is that, well, at least against the Ukrainian military, the Russian military is pretty. formidable. Yeah, and I would even add to that a bit by, you know, I think a lot of people in the West have this, have this idea of like, yeah, but it's the Ukrainians, you know, it's just the Ukrainians. This is a, this is an army now. I mean, they're, they're again, scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point, but, you know, in the, in the meat of this war, this was an army that was trained and equipped up to NATO standards. And I would say, you know, look, you think your average

Ukrainian male, you know, who joins the military voluntarily, that he is not a hell of a lot tougher than like your average guy in France or Germany or America, for that matter, you're damn right he is. Like, those guys are no joke. These guys are motivated. They're serious. They're well-trained. They're well equipped. And other than, honestly, like, other than the U.S. and maybe Turkey and Poland, you go back to, like, just before the war started in 2022. And the Ukrainian military probably would have kicked the hell out of any NATO country one-on-one, you know, in a straight-up fight. I mean, this is a formidable force. And, you know, people talk about the difference in population, which obviously is coming into play at this point.

But at the same time, you know, Russia doesn't look at Ukraine. say, oh, this is such a tiny country. Ukraine's got about the same ratio of population to Russia now that Germany did in 1941 to the Soviet Union. I mean, and they know how much damage, you know, a small country can do if they, if they bust loose and break out. And so, you know, Ukraine is, I mean, they showed it. Look, you take nothing away from the actual guys on the ground who were fighting.

They showed their willingness for a long time. I mean, it looks like the edges are starting to fray now, but these guys showed their willingness to die in place, you know, to hold their ground and fight to the last man very often, not surrender when it was obvious that there was nowhere to go and that the fight was over. And, you know, these guys are very motivated game fighters who gave the, look, I mean, Putin did not, people look at like the initial invasion

when Putin supposedly thought he was going to conquer all of Ukraine and take Kiev and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, it's so silly. Like, when you look at the amount of troops and specifically, like, which troops, a lot of Wagner troops and stuff who were brought in, you know, it was the whole country coming in on five different axes was barely enough troops to throw at one of Ukraine's secondary cities. I mean, if you're really going to take it. Like, you know, it was clear from the beginning that that was not what they were trying to do. I think that they probably severely miscalculated and thought that as long as we show that we're serious, then the Ukrainians will panic and come to the table. And then they'll sign a real deal and we can, you know, get this done. And so you see it in the tactics they employed with, you know, you have columns of armor just rolling down country roads with no infantry.

support, no nothing, and they end up getting shredded. And it's because I don't, you know, they weren't, they weren't expecting a fight. They weren't expecting, uh, the kind of resistance that they got. So they didn't go in prepared for it. But then even for months after that, you know, for months and months after that, it was very apparent, I think that Putin, like he didn't want to admit that this was even a war. You know, they call it a special military operation for a long time. And it took him a long time to mobilize. And, you know, even to this day, you know, Putin's rockets could have flattened Kiev a long time ago. You know, at the beginning of the Iraq war, both Iraq wars, the first thing we did, we knocked out their entire communications grid, destroyed all their power, all their

clean water, all their infrastructure. We just wiped it out, like the first night, you know, in Iraq. Putin didn't do any of that for like a year. He wasn't doing any of that. And, you know, And he still is not attacking Kiev when he could be he could be doing that. And I think, you know, he for up until the mobilization, which I think was probably driven by internal pressure from people to his right in the Russian establishment, you know, that he was still trying to find some way to get this done with minimal damage to both sides, you know. And then he finally just had to admit, okay, no, this is a war. and I can't sign a deal with the Americans or with NATO. Nothing that they say is reliable. I just have to, you know, fight this thing to the end until this country is no longer a threat to me and not an asset to NATO.

And, you know, at this point, like, I don't know. You know, it's very unfortunate for the Ukrainians themselves, right? Because you go back, you mention that Zelensky and Putin were negotiating in the opening months of the war. and that they had a verbal agreement, like a tentative verbal agreement that was going to bring it to a halt. And that Boris Johnson flew over there. It's all infamous now and told him, you know, no, you're not. And you think about that. I mean, it's really, that's really evil.

I mean, this is, because this is a country that, you know, Ukraine, like, we had the power to tell them, like, you end this war. And, you know, we're just going to leave you hanging. And you can, you know, your, you're blown up cities and, you know, your destroyed economy and all that, you guys can just have fun with that because we're not helping. Even though you got into this whole thing largely because of, you know, policies we were using you as a proxy for, we could just abandon them and really put the hurt on them. So we essentially blackmailed them into continuing to throw their young men into this meat grinder. And, you know, it's really awful. But, yeah, I think that at this point, unfortunately, you know, the Russians probably feel like they have to fight this thing to the end, which is not what Putin wanted to do. I think that's clear.

And I'm not like, look, man, like Putin is not like some fuzzy, friendly fella, you know? I mean, he's a hardcore, ruthless dude. and nobody but a hardcore ruthless dude was going to pull Russia out of the condition it was in in the 90s when the government is controlled by the guys who own the entire economy. They control regions of the country with their own private armies. And he managed to reestablish the prerogative of the Russian state and put that society back together and clip the wings of all those oligarchs without a civil war. I mean, that's amazing.

It really is amazing that that happened. And, you know, some guy who was, you know, Bernie Sanders was not going to be able to do something like that. He's a hard man who came up in a very, very hard time. And so, but, you know, yeah, I think that, but yeah, I think that's where we're at. I think that Russia has finally kind of, you know, reached a point of exasperation where it's a affected, you know, over the long term, I think that they have accepted that, you know, we're never really going to fully accept them and we're never going to let them in. And so that's why, you know, they've solidified their relationships with China and Iran and India. You know,

India didn't abandon Russia. And a lot, you know, a lot of the countries around the world. I mean, that's what you want to talk about like the failures of the Newland policy. I mean, the Russian military is way stronger now than it was beforehand. The Russian military has a ton of experience fighting NATO tactics and NATO weapon systems that it didn't have before. It's, Russia has had a long and brutal war to advance their understanding of drone tactics on the battlefield. You know, probably a decade or two worth of like military advancement in that space has probably been compressed into like two years and you know they've had to learn a lot of that the hard way but they've learned it now and if you look at the united states like what we gain from this you know

what like you know our other rivals around the world uh you know china india just not not rivals but the other powers around the world have seen that there are limits to what we can actually do which you know maybe they believed that before but they weren't sure um you know they saw Iraq or or or Libya or something and they say okay they you know Americans weren't able to achieve their goal or whatever but they can sure as hell cause a hell of a lot of problems you know for us that we don't want but they see that there's limitations to that is to happen you know what we can actually do um a lot of countries that were you know that we're friendly with and we're still friendly with you know India Brazil uh Mexico a lot of these countries um we told them you know

you have to, we need you to be with us on this, cut Russia off, you know, follow these sanctions. And most of those countries said no. And, you know, outside of NATO said no. And there were no consequences for that. You know, we weren't able to impose any consequences on them. And the fact that, you know, these financial institutions that the United States has really used as instruments of global control for, you know, in the post-war period, like the IMF and all these others, the Swift system and so forth. You know, these are things that before countries had to worry, like, what actually will happen if they cut us off the Swift system? Like, that could be Armageddon. Like, that could be all. But now everybody's seen it, that actually, you know, you can get by. You can get by just

fine. And, you know, we're in a much weaker position now. We, um, Europe is in. a much weaker position, although, you know, I've heard people hypothesized that maybe that was, you know, kind of part of the goal of this whole thing was to, you know, was to make sure that, you know, Europe didn't, I mean, if you go, like, everybody knows that Russia asked, Yeltsin and Putin one time asked about Russia joining NATO, because that was one of their solutions. They were like, in fact, Yeltsin said, look, why don't we, this is when we were talking about the first tranche of expansion in the mid-Denbush. 90s and he was like, I'll tell you what, why don't we join NATO first?

And then we'll bring in all the countries between us. And we won't have anything to worry about because we're part of the program. And of course, we said no. You know, we were, that was never on the table because, A, you know, NATO is, it's just the deal. It's, it's the, you know, it's the instrument of American control over Europe. That's what it is. We're not going to, you know, share the, share the room with, another large power that we can't control and has ideas of their own.

But then also it was, you know, if Russia is our friend, then Europe might start looking around and say, well, wait, okay, what do we need, you know, an American military base in Germany for if Russia is our friend? What do we need to continue to like take dictations from Washington, D.C. on our foreign policy if the only country that's even feasibly a threat to us is now not just not a threat, but an ally. And, you know, so it's, it's dark and crazy to think that, you know, that planners might have been thinking that way. But at the same time, it would be in keeping with, you know, a lot of their behavior where you use controlled chaos. You know, a lot of times chaos is the goal. You know, if you look at like, this is something Putin talks about all the time. And most Americans are just like, huh, what's he talking about? But after, during as well, but then even after the second war with Chechnya was over, we were over there, like funding, training, you know, these jihadists who were there.

This is after the war's over. Like, they're not going to retake, you know, Grazny or anything. Like, that's all over. But what we wanted was just to keep enough chaos going in that region so that, you know, a pipeline couldn't get built down to the Black Sea that Russia was trying to do for, years and a lot of these other things. You couldn't develop, you know, a lot of the region strategically because there's just too much chaos popping off. And then by the way, and I, and I, you know, some of this is public knowledge, but, you know, I have like confirmation from a Marine who was a part of the training operation working out of Istanbul when Marsoc was, was training these jihadists and

arming them. One of them, one of our main guys, there was, there were four main ones. warlords that we were like really working with all had their own militias. And one of them, his group, you know, and as far as I know, you know, we were not working directly with them anymore at this point. But it was his group that went and did the Beslan school attack in Russia. And so I mean, you know, you just, again, you have to try to put yourself in the position of the Russians. And you see something like that, you know, and think of how we would respond to. it. And, you know, I think about like, you know, you've heard like Dan Crenshaw, Lindsay Graham, you guys just total maniacs, you know, they go on Twitter or they go in public. Dan Crenshaw

actually said this is almost word for word, I think. He said, you know, I don't understand why people have a problem with what we're doing over in Ukraine. A bunch of Russians are dying and it's not costing us anything but money. Like that's literally what he said. And so imagine like we're Iraq and the Russians are just training, arming, and not even on the sly. They're just like basically leading the insurgency against us. And Russian politicians are out there in public saying, oh yeah, we don't, our only goal is to kill Americans. Like, we just want to see more dead Americans. Like other than that, like, if that happens, we're, you know, we're happy. Dead Americans is cool in our book. That's enough for us. You think these people are fucking maniacs, you know? And, uh,

and I think that's where. the Russians are with us at that at this point and it's unfortunate because you know I love Russia I I mean I you know I started reading Russian literature when I was a teenager and you know I've always loved it I love the culture and I find it to be a real tragedy that that our relationship to that country has been dragged down by a few you know really malicious interested parties well let's finish on that I mentioned before we started recording that, you know, we talked about managerially interested parties that they can get, they can start wars, they can foment wars, they can fund wars that we, that even Americans don't

have to fight in. And Colonel McGregor, Douglas McGregor, has been running around basically saying that he believes that there's an, the people who are doing this in the United States government or doing it out of an ethnic, um, an ethnic vendetta, basically that Victoria Newland, her husband, Robert Kagan, Kagan is Russian for Kohn,

um, that it's a Jewish animosity for the pale of settlement, Stettles, the pogroms. Um, how do you answer? What, what do you think of,

you know, McGregor saying that, what's your opinion? I think that there's, there's, definitely something to it, but it's not just the Jews, you know? Like, you, you listen to the, the polls. Like, I think the polls, they're like, if we go to nuclear war, we go to nuclear war. Like, as long as Moscow gets flattened as part of that deal, I'm cool for it. Like, they're just

absolute maniac. And mind you, and mind you, there are 4,000 Jews in Poland. Yeah. I looked, I looked that up recently when that whole, when that one Polish politician extinguished a menorah, I look to see what the Jewish population of Poland was and it's like 4,000 right now. So yeah. Yeah. And I mean, look, like there's this, there's this, there's this good joke. See if I can get it right where this, this Polish peasant is out in his field and he finds a magic lamp, a genie lamp. And so he gives it a rub. He's going to have his wishes. The genie pops out and says, you get three wishes. What's your first wish? And he says, I want China to invade Poland. He says, huh? You want to repeat that?

And he tells him, he's like, whatever, I was fine. And so, you know, a few hours later, or however long later, see smoke on the horizon and tanks start rolling in and the Air Force rolls in. The Chinese military comes in, just flattens Poland, just wipes out the guy's village, everywhere else destroyed. And then they go home. And he says, all right, so I want my second wish. And he's like, what do you want this time?

You want me to rebuild the country? Like, what is it you want? He said, I want China to invade. Poland again. He's like, okay. And so the whole same thing happens again. And third wish, he wants China to invade Poland again. And so it happens again. He says, I got to ask you. Like, why is it that you want, like, don't you love your country? Or do you really hate your country? Why are you want China to come destroy it? He said, are you kidding? I love my country. I love Poland more than anything. But to come to Poland three times, China's got to go through Russia six times. And

you know on one level like i think that um and you know i've got friends in in the baltic especially but but in poland as well and they would all fight me on this uh but i think there's a certain level a certain a certain way in which you know those countries were part of the soviet union some more willingly than others you know poland honestly is one of the one of the ones that was was was was part of the soviet union much more unwillingly but um you know the soviet union was a was a multi-ethnic multinational project especially early on before stalin kind of reconverted it into a sort of a russian empire but you know this is a multi-ethnic multinational project that had participation you know from strong communist parties like across eastern europe who were who were

doing this you know it was not uh it was not a bunch of russians who were were going into, you know, country A and, you know, attacking the ethnic people over here. It was their own communist parties who were leading those efforts, you know, and taking leadership from Moscow, obviously. And so this went on for a long time. And I think, like, you know, there's something of once the Soviet Union fell and these countries are sort of reckoning with their own past, their own, the fact that, you know, you're a country that was part of the Soviet Union. And now you're not, but you're still living in the, you know, next door to a guy who was part of the secret police. You're living next door to a, you know, a communist apparatchik over here or something.

And you have to figure out how are we going to knit this society back together? Like, how are we going to? And I think one of the ways that they've done it is they just think now, like, the Soviet Union was Russia. Russia is the Soviet Union. Us, we're pure victims of Russian imperialism. And that was our role in the Soviet Union. and just as victims. And so even our people who are a part of that or whatever,

like, you know, we really had no choice and we can all kind of come together. And so I think it's been like a mechanism for pulling, you know, those societies back together in a cohesive way. I don't want to say it's the beginning and end of it, but I think there's something to that. Cool.

It's all everybody where they can find your work. So I've got a podcast where I do long-form history stuff. It's called Martyr Made. And you can find that on iTunes. or Spotify or whatever. I've got another podcast with my buddy Jocko Willink called The Unraveling, where we talk about sort of more recent history and contemporary events. And then I've got a substack, martyramade.substack.com,

where I kind of go into a lot of these things even more in depth. Subscribe to all of them. I do. Thank you, Darrell. Thanks, brother. Always a good time. I want to welcome everyone to part one, the official. Part one, first part of my reading of Kudata.

And I have a special guest here, Daryl Cooper. How you doing, Darrell? Doing great, man. It's always good to be on. Yeah, yeah. So tell me, I asked John when I had him on before, when did Kudita by Lutbuk, come onto your radar. I think I read this book of maybe, gosh, it must have been,

it must have been 15 years ago now. Yeah, around 2009, 2010. And I was reading a lot of that kind of stuff. You know, I was reading a lot of Peterdale Scott and, you know, reading a lot about just like the Banana Award, just all the 20th century kind of Cold War stuff. And I read through it back then. But I'll tell you, it's one of those books that I think the last 15 years

that have passed since that time have really given the book a new flow. in a way because, you know, I read it back then and I enjoyed it. I've been rereading it because we're going to talk about it. And I've been getting a lot more out of it. There's a lot more to draw on for sure. So I'm looking forward to it. Cool. So what we're going to do is the preface to the first edition is one page.

I'll read it and then skip to the first chapter. If there's anything you want to comment in on here on the preface, just let me know. All right. Let's go. This is a handbook. It is therefore not concerned with the theoretical analysis of the coup d'etat, but rather with the formulation of the techniques which can be employed to seize power within a state. It can be compared to a cookery book in the sense that it aims at enabling any layperson equipped with enthusiasm and the right ingredients to carry out his own coup.

Only a knowledge of the rules is required. Two words of caution. In the first place, In order to carry out a successful coup, certain preconditions must be present. Just as in cooking boulea base, one needs the right sorts of fish to start with. Second, readers should be aware that the penalty of failure is far greater than having to eat out of a tin. The rewards, too, are greater. It may be objected that, should such a handbook be inadequate or misleading, the readers will be subject to great dangers, while if it is an efficient guide to the problems, it may lead to upheavals and disturbances.

My defense is that coups are already common and if, as a result of this book, a greater number of people learn how to carry them out, this is merely a step towards the democratization of the coup, a fact that all persons of liberal sentiments should applaud. Finally, it should be noted that the techniques here discussed are politically neutral and concerned only with the objective of seizing control of the state and not at all with subsequent policies. I want to jump into Chapter 1? Let's do it. All right. Chapter 1, what is Akuta Tah?

I got a couple quotes here. I shall be sorry to commence the era of peace by a coup d'etat such as that I had in contemplation. Duke of Wellington, 1811. No other way of salvation remained except for the Army's intervention. Constantine Collius, April 21st, 1967, Athens. All right, starting with the text. Though the term coup d'etat has been used for more than three centuries, the feasibility of the coup derives from a comparatively recent development,

the rise of the modern state with its professional bureaucracy and standing armed forces. The power of the modern state largely depends on this permanent machinery, which, with its archives, files, records, and officials can follow intimately and, if it so desires, control the activities of lesser organizations and individuals. Totalitarian states merely use more fully the detailed and comprehensive information available to most states. However, democratic, the instrument is largely the same, though it is used differently. right off the bat when you start reading this, it really seems like he's describing the managerial state, right? What has existed since, let's call it the late 20s to early 30s?

You're muted. Yeah, I forgot about that. There's like a Weberian aspect to it too, right? Like Max Weber describes three forms of like organizational or political authority. You got like the charismatic or the traditional or the legal rational. And that's what he's talking about here. And, you know, for Lutwak, the coup is really only possible with the legal rational. When you get that distinction between the political authority and the state machinery,

where there's sort of two distinct things. You can swap people out at the top, and they are conferred genuine power from their position. You know, in a traditional authority structure, which is just basically like a patronage system, everything from, you know, say Saudi Arabia today to feudal systems in the past, you know, these things were built on organic relationships. Like that's what the system of power represented was the totality of these organic relationships. And a coup, you can't really pull off a coup unless you're maybe, you know, a brother taking out the, you know, the crown prince and taking his place or something like that.

But that's about it. And same with charismatic authority where leadership sort of coalesces around the person of a single charismatic individual. A lot of times you don't have much of an organization to go with that. The organization is, you know, the gathering of people around the man. And it's very hard to pull off a coup in that environment. Once the legal rational system gets in place, though, and especially once it gains a sort of autonomy and self-awareness, you know, of itself as a class and as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a function, um, it starts to learn how to defend itself and it'll start to, uh, you know,

fend off challenges from charismatic leaders or traditionalist, uh, you know, patronage type type networks. And, um, you know, and it's only that type that, yeah, that you can run a coup against. Yep. All right. Onward. The growth of modern state bureaucracies has two implications that are crucial for the feasibility of the coup. The emergence of clear distinctions between the permanent machinery of state and the political leadership and the fact that state bureaucracies have structured hierarchies with definite chains of command. The distinction between the bureaucrat as an employee of the state and as a personal servant of the ruler is a new one, and both the British and the American systems show residual features of the earlier structure.

The importance of this development lies in the fact that if the bureaucrats are linked to the leadership, an illegal seizure of power must take the form of a palace revolution, which essentially concerns the manipulation of the person of the ruler. That ruler may be forced to accept new policies or new advisors, or may be killed or held captive. But whatever happens, the palace revolution can only be conducted from the inside and by insiders. An insider might be the commander of the palace guard as in ancient Rome or the Ethiopia of the 1960s, and if the dynastic system is preserved, the aim is to replace the unwanted ruler

with a more malleable descendant. The coup is a much more democratic affair. It can be conducted from the outside and operates in the area outside the government, but within the state, the area formed by the permanent professional civil service, the armed forces, and the police. The aim is to detach the permanent employees of the state from the political leadership, and usually this cannot be done if the two are linked by political, ethnic, or traditional loyalties. I don't know that people saw, like when you read that last paragraph, how clearly you can see what he talks about with. The aim is to detach to permanent employees, which we would call the deep state now from the political leadership.

And usually this cannot be done. I don't know that when he wrote this, it was even sure. Ernam had written the managerial revolution 30 years, 33 years earlier, or 30 years earlier. But I don't know that that was as widely understood as it is now, the fact that we're basically run by managerialism. Yeah, and it's interesting, given that the people who kind of put over that revolution were quite explicit about their goal in doing that, in detaching political authority and government machinery, right? If you go back to like the late 1800s, most American cities, local and even state governments, which the federal government was much smaller and weaker back then. So that meant most of government in America, you know,

it was run by ethnic patronage networks that sort of emerged more or less organically as a way of organizing people for political activity. And the progressive movement, movement was a very explicit, you know, the good government movement, very explicit sort of attack on those patronage networks. And, you know, you can take that all the way up to like Colonel House's book or all the way eventually in the apotheosis, obviously, in the New Deal revolution when that all really came together. And they're quite explicit about it, but for some reason, yeah, it's something that's that's been lost a bit today. You know, when you, when you, when we were kids, we watched schoolhouse rock. They had that little commercial, you know, where there's like the piece of paper and he's like, hey, folks, I'm a bill.

And here's how I get past. There's three branches of government and so forth. And like, you know, and this is how your government works. And that, you know, that's not how the government works at all, right? I mean, the government, 99% of the government and certainly all of the functional parts of the government, the ones that actually take action, it's this unelected bureaucracy that that's purpose is to be completely detached from political authority, which is to say, you know, in an ideal world, or if our system worked the way it was supposed to, which is to say that it's detached from

accountability from the population. All right. Onward. In the last dynasty of Imperial China, as in present-day African state, it was primarily an ethnic bond that secured the loyalty of the state apparatus. The Manchu dynasty was careful to follow native Chinese customs, and it employed Han Chinese in the civil service at all levels, but the crucial posts in the high magistracy and the army were filled by the descendants of the Jurchans who had entered China with their chiefs,

the founders of the dynasty. Similarly, African rulers typically appointment members of their own tribe to the key posts in the armed forces, police, and security services. When a party machine controls civil service appointments, either as part of a more general totalitarian control or because of a very long period in office, as in post-war Italy till the late 1980s, political associates are appointed to the senior levels of the bureaucracy, partly in order to protect the regime and partly to ensure the sympathetic execution of policies. In the communist countries of yesterday year, all senior jobs were, of course, held by party apparatchiks.

Saudi Arabia provides an instance of traditional bonds. In this case, the lack of modern know-how on the part of the traditional tribal affiliates of the Royal House has meant that what could not be done individually has been done organizationally. The modern army, manned by some hundred thousand unreliable city dwellers, is outnumbered by the 125,000 or so enrolled in the white army of the Bedouin, or at least nominally Bedouin, followers of the Saudis, officially known as the Haras al-Watani, Guard of the Homeland, or National Guard. The so-called White Army, it includes a tribal militia of some 25,000 official, officially designated the Imam Muhammad bin Saud-mechanized brigade, based in the capital of Riyadh, and plainly

meant as an anti-coup force. Have you been to Saudi? I have been to Riyadh once, and other than that, I got stuck on a tarmac and a helicopter in 120-degree heat for about eight hours one time. All right, I'll keep going. Such ethnic or traditional bonds between the political leadership and the heads of the bureaucracy and the armed forces are not typical of the modern state, while looser class or ethnic affiliations will tend to embrace groups large enough to be successfully infiltrated by the planners of the coup. As a direct consequence of its sheer size, in order to achieve even a minimum of efficiency, the state bureaucracy has to divide its work into clear-cut areas of competence, which are assigned to different departments. Within each department, there must be an accepted chain of command and standard procedures have to be followed. Thus, a given piece of information or a given order is followed up in a stereotyped manner,

and if the order comes from the appropriate source at the appropriate level, it is carried out. In the more critical parts of the state apparatus, the armed forces, the police, and the security services, all these characteristics are intensified with an even greater degree of discipline and rigidity. The apparatus of the state is, therefore, to some extent a machine that will normally behave, behave in a fairly predictable and automatic manner. What happens if it stops operating in a predictable and automatic manner? Well, I mean, I think what Lubbock's saying here is that, you know, he's pointing out that, I think he's probably setting up to defend his thesis that you can actually speak,

for lack of a better word, like scientifically, about these processes. You know, that this is something that, that these are systems. that have certain rules and laws and guidelines that they run by. And so you can actually speak about them in general terms. But what happens if they stop reacting in a predictable manner? I mean, at that point, you're very, very, very close to the edge. The whole purpose of the, I mean, if you think about the base level of all government, right? And maybe this has something to do with Weber's traditional patrimony-based system of authority.

But at the bottom of it is whoever can provide physical security and whoever can distribute resources that people need to live or secure and distribute those resources, then that's going to – that's the government in time. Like it might not be today, but eventually if the government that you think you have can't do those things, then that's not going to be the government. government for long. You see this with like a terrorist organ, I mean, we had to come to terms with this, like in Iraq, for example, right? When we went into Iraq, people really did go in with all of these, you know, for all the cynicism of the neocons and everything, like these people when they, you know, they really had sort of siop themselves into believing that, you know, the people of the world are just Americans in embryo. And as soon as they're given the opportunity, we get rid of Saddam Hussein or whoever, then they're going to throw roses at our feet and be happy to become, because they were

thinking of, you know, Poland in 1989, you know, Czechoslovakia in 1989. Like, you just take that boot off their neck and they want to wear blue jeans and basically be Americans, like if they're given the opportunity. And they really did sigh off themselves into believing that to a degree. But then once we got in there, we had to deal with the reality, which the terrorist organization, the insurgents understood much better than we did at first, which was, you know, they knew that if they could prove that the Americans could not protect you, could not provide physical security, and that the Americans weren't able to ensure that you and your family could eat or have water, then we weren't going to be governing that country for very long, you know. and the people who are capable of turning those things, the violence spigot or the resource spigot on and off, if the insurgents through violence could make that be them,

then they would replace us. And they understood that. We had to kind of, we had to kind of adapt to that. And we got to the point once you got up to like 0-6-07, where we did kind of just accept that. Petraeus went out with like hundreds of millions of dollars and just started paying off tribal cheeks, not so much so that, you know,

it wasn't so that they could go stuff it in their Swiss bank account and flee the country if things go bad later on. It was so that we were conferring upon them the legitimacy they needed as distributors of resources. They could actually give their people things that they needed while we provided physical security to actually get them on our side. That's like really the fundamental kind of base level of all government. And so in that sense, If it starts acting unpredictably at that point, then you're already in a period of, you know, of severe breakdown. Yeah, I remember a couple years ago, my friend Rachel and I were discussing, texting back and forth asking about, well, if everything collapsed, who's in charge? And she said, well, obviously, whoever can feed you.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, I think if you go back, even to just the origins of human government, you know, once you get past the sort of band level of organization, you know, where the guy in charge is your grandfather or whatever, you see this. I mean, it's built into our myths.

You see it in history where, you know, where we have access to it, is that the basic form of government is a warrior and his friends. You know, if you're a farmer and you're out here and you have a bunch of lions terrorizing your livestock and,

you know, threatening your children when they go outside, and it's a pack of lions and you're a farmer, you know? In the days before firearms, you know, that's a real problem for you. In fact, that's like a, that's a life or death problem for you, not just whether or not you get killed by a lion, but whether you can actually do the things you need to do to eat. And so a guy shows up on a horse with six of his friends and says,

where are the lions? They're that way. And he goes and kills those lions. That dude's in charge. And you're fine with that, you know. And that's a legit. legitimate basis of human government in a lot of ways. All right. A coup operates by taking advantage of this machine-like behavior, both during and after

the takeover. During the coup, because it uses parts of the state apparatus to seize the controlling levers over the rest, and afterward, because the value of the levers depends on the degree to which the state really functions as a machine. We will see that some states are so well organized that the machine is sufficiently sophisticated to exercise discretion, according to a given conception of what is proper and what is not, in the orders that it executes. This is the case in the most advanced countries, and in such circumstances, a coup is very difficult to carry out. In a few states, the bureaucracy is so small that the apparatus is too simple and too intimately linked with the leadership to allow room for a coup, as it, as

as is still the case, perhaps, in the ex-British protectorates of Southern Africa, Botswana, Lassotho, and Swaziland. Fortunately, most states are between those two extremes, with bureaucratic machines both large and unsophisticated, and thus highly vulnerable to those who can identify and seize the right levers. One of the most striking developments of the 20th century was the great decline in general political stability. since the French Revolution, governments have been overthrown at an increasing pace. In the 19th century, the French experienced two revolutions and two regimes collapsed following the military defeat. In 1958, the change of regime that brought Charles de Gaulle to enduring power was a blend of those elements. People everywhere have followed the French

example, and the lifespan of regimes has tended to decrease while the lifespan of their subjects has increased. This contrasts sharply with the relative attachment to the system of constitutional monarchy displayed in the 19th century. When Greeks, Bulgarians, and Romanians secured their freedom from the Turkish colonial system, they immediately went over to Germany in order to shop around for a suitable royal family. Crowns, flags, and decorations were designed and purchased from reputable English suppliers. Royal palaces were built. And where possible, hunting lodges, royal mistresses,

and a local aristocracy were provided as fringe benefits. The 20th century peoples have, on the other hand, showed a marked lack of interest in monarchies in their paraphernalia. When the British kindly provided them with a proper royal family, unhappy Iraqis made numerous efforts to dispense with it before finally succeeding by massacre in 1958. Military and other right-wing forces have, meanwhile, tried to keep up with violent mass movements,

using their own illegal methods to seize power and overthrow regimes. Why did the regimes of the 20th century prove to be so fragile? It is, after all, paradoxical that this fragility increased while the established procedures for securing changes in government were becoming more flexible. The political scientist will reply that, although the procedures became more flexible, the pressures for change were also becoming stronger, and the increase in flexibility did not keep up with the increase. social and economic stresses.

Violent method. You want to say something? Yeah, I actually wanted to go back a little bit to, I was thinking about when he was talking about, you know, that you have to kind of have this Goldilocks bureaucracy, right? This Goldilocks state where it is developed enough that it's worth taking the reins of, you know, that if you get the control of it, then you actually have power. that it's developed enough for that but that it's not so mature that it can exercise self-will you know if it doesn't like who the leader is or what the leader wants to do and um

you know there's a there's a sense in which like if you think of like the the national socialist revolution in germany you know obviously that wasn't a coup or coup dutata or anything but it really was like a i mean it was a revolution in the system of government there for sure that if you were to go back, you know, before that, well, it was something that like, it like not understanding this the, this part, I think kind of led to, it was part of what led to the conflict that eventually emerged between, uh, the regime and the sort of the old school hardcore revolutionaries of like the essay, for example, right? Because once Hitler got into power, he had to deal with the fact that this machinery existed that he was now at the controls of

that he had to compromise with on some level, you know, because it was developed enough to resist anything he wanted to do if he couldn't co-opt it like that. He had to make certain compromises to accommodate it. And, you know, the Ernst Roams of the world and stuff, these were hardcore, like street revolutionaries, and they didn't like that. And you see that in a lot of these revolutions and it's why you know in revolutions uh all over the world throughout the 20th century the first thing that happens is the revolutionary sees control the government and uh the second thing that happens is most of the revolutionaries get killed off by the boss you know yeah for um and if you study you know if you study the rise of the national socialist and they're taking power it's pretty clear why

you know, Thomas went over that. We did a whole episode on that. And, you know, he just looked at it from a real politic standpoint. It's like, yeah, these are the guys who brought you here. But, I mean, some of these guys just, they weren't going to be along for the ride. And they were not going to let go on their own.

Yeah. This is a, this is a total off-topic digression real quick. But I'm just going to throw it out there in case you have anybody who wants to pick this one up. Like, if I was, if I had any talent, as a fiction writer, like as a novelist. You know the book I would write? I would love to read a book that is about,

it's a biography or a mini biography of the period of Hitler's life from the rise to power, like through the 20s, you know, from the putch and on its way up, all the way up and ends in 1934 when he had to kill Rome and a lot of these essay guys and just the inner turmoil that he had to have gone through, you know, having to take out so many of the people who had, you know, been, who had ridden with him up to that point

and been through everything with him and coming to the conclusion and having to carry out something that, you know, that was necessary, but maybe very distasteful to him. I think that would be a great story. Yeah, I think most people, most people hear that story just think he was an absolute madman and don't take into consideration you know what he thought what he believed was coming and what needed and you know what the what the

fight was actually going to be and well yeah well let's go let's go on we can stay we get detoured on that one for a while all right violent methods are generally used when legal methods of securing a governmental change are useless because they are either too rigid, as in the case of ruling monarchies where the ruler actually controls policy formation, or not rigid enough. It was once remarked, for example, that the throne of Russia was, until the 17th century, neither hereditary nor elective, but occupative. The long series of abdications forced by the great boyar landlords and the Strzzi, the Kremlin palace guards, had weakened the hereditary principle so that whoever took the throne became Tsar.

Precedents by birth counted for little. Some contemporary republics have ended up in this position, which comes about when a long series of illegal seizures of power leads to a decay of the legal and political structures needed to produce new governments. Thus, Syria went through more than a dozen coups before the Assad family dynasty was established by Hafez al-Assad's 1970 coup and the provisions for all open general elections

written in the Haurani constitution could no longer be applied because the necessary supervisory machinery decayed and disappeared. Assuming, however, that there is an established procedure for changing the leadership, then all other methods must fall within some category of illegality. What we call them depends on what side we are on,

but skipping some of the details, we use one of the following terms. All right, so a bunch of listed terms here, though, with brief explanations. Revolution. Oh, sorry. I was just going to jump in real quick and say, like, you know, there's a, like, the obvious geopolitical,

reason that the post-colonial states in the 20th century were the places where coups happened more than any other places one part of it's geopolitical and it's obvious right that was the those were the places that were up for grabs in the Cold War right and so they had both sides sort of vying for them but also from like a lute walk perspective you know it's interesting because they those were the those were the countries that kind of fit the model that he's talking about here the best in the sense that you had these, say in Africa, you had these countries that really were only countries because the French and the British drew some lines on a map, right? That's why it's a country that has a state machinery that is somewhat well developed because it was either left in

place or put in place as the colonizers were leaving. And so there's this machinery that can kind of run the country, can kind of defend itself against interlocal. and so forth that exists and whoever controls it, you know, is sort of in charge. But there's no, you know, the population itself is just broken up into tribes. They don't identify with each other. There's no nation underlying this thing. In other words, the power structure doesn't actually represent any organic power. It's just this thing that's there that's sort of imposed on people.

It's not representative of anything that really like on the ground, right? Like if you look at Afghanistan, for example, you know, there are people who are going to call them geniuses or anything. There's people with basic common sense who back in 2001 were saying this is a, this is just never going to work in the long term for the very simple reason that the Northern Alliance, all these people that like we're going over there and wanting to ally with, that these people, it's a big coalition of all the different minority groups in Afghanistan. And you want to bring this coalition together. they have nothing in common. They really don't have, you know, anything that they share other than their opposition to the posthune majority. And so it's going to make them completely dependent on the United States occupation forces. And once that occupation forces leave, whether it's now, whether it's in 100 years,

those people are going to scatter to the winds because the real power, the organic power in this country is the postume majority that is organized under the Taliban. ban. And, you know, and that's real power. Whether they're not, whether or not they are represented in the government or not, usually, you know, reality wins out. And so you have a lot of these African countries and other post-colonial countries that had that state machinery with nothing underneath it. And even a place like Liberia, Liberia is actually a great example because it was never a colony. You know, it was like you had essentially like Monrovia was like a city state where, you know, a bunch of former American slaves had gone to live. And they never really even left Monrovia or the immediate

environs of Monrovia much. They didn't go out to the hinterlands, you know, or anything. But then once the French and the British really started to get on their colonization spree in Africa, we started putting pressure on the Americo-Liberians in Monrovia. We were like, you need to become a country. You can't just be a city-state. We need you to form the country of Liberia, and we're going to define its borders so that we can say to the French and British, like, you can't come in here. You have to stay out of this area. And so they did. And they went and they created a quote unquote country of Liberia with a government of Liberia, you know, and they created a sort of national, quote unquote, police force that went out and found which tribal authorities and chiefs could be co-opted,

getting rid of the ones that couldn't, and then reinforcing the co-opted ones authority with the national security forces. But it was always just very, very, very inorganic. It never had any purchase like on the ground in most of the country. It was something that existed on paper to a large degree. And you saw in the 20th century that, you know, with the slightest push, a place like that comes apart. All right. First one, revolution. The action is conducted initially at any rate by uncoordinated popular masses, and it aims at changing the social and political structures, as well as the personalities and the leadership. The term revolution has gained a certain popularity, and many coups are graced with it because of the implication that it was the people,

rather than a few plotters who did the whole thing. Thus, the obscure aims Abed al-Karim Qasim had in mind when he overthrew the Iraqi regime of King Faisal, the second, and Prime Minister Nourius Asaid, are locally known as the sacred principles of the July 14th Revolution. Next one is Civil War. Civil War is outright warfare between elements of the armed forces and or the population at large. The term is perpetually unfashionable. Whenever there's a civil war, all sides typically deny its existence, variously passing it off. as an international war, such as the war between the states or of the Confederacy, or more often as a foreign aggression, though in Franco's Spain, the Civil War of 1936 to 1939, was always the Crusade. Pronuncimi-Prononzie mi-a-si-miento.

This is an essentially Spanish and South American version of the military coup d'etat, but many recent African coups have also taken this. particular form. In its original 19th century Spanish version, it was a highly ritualized process. First came to the Troubos, literally the works, in which the opinions of army officers were sounded. The next step was the compromisos in which commitments were made and rewards promised, then came the call for action, and finally the appeal to the troops to follow their officers in rebellion against the government. The pronunciamanto was often a liberal rather than a reactionary phenomenon, and the theoretical purpose of the takeover was to ascertain the national will, a typical liberal concept. Later, as the army became increasingly right-wing, while Spanish governments became less so, the theory shifted from the neoliberal national will to the neo-conservative real-will theory.

the latter postulates that the existence of a national essence, a sort of permanent spiritual structure, which the wishes of the majority may not always express. The army was entrusted with the interpretation and preservation of this essential Spain and the obligation to protect it against the government and, if need be, against the people. The pronunciamiento was organized and led by a particular army leader,

but it was carried out in the name of the entire officer corps, unlike the Putsch, which is carried out by a faction within the army, or the coup, which can also be executed by civilians using some army units. The pronunciamiento leads to a takeover by the army as a whole. Many African takeovers in which the army had participated as a whole were therefore very similar to the classic pronouncing. pronunciamiento what do you how do you this was written before um before chile 1973 how would how would that be how would that even fit into that yeah i think it would fit in

to what he's saying you know in the sense of representing at least the majority of the armed forces um you know it's another interesting example is like uh when um cecy and egypt throughout the Muslim Brotherhood. And, you know, you saw in that situation, I mean, in a way you could say that wasn't, it wasn't quite a coup in the sense that what was really happening was the real power in the, in the country was revealing itself, you know, that the, that the deep state there was always in charge election or no election. And it was, it was making that clear.

But still, like, that's how it played out. but when that happened you know sure Mubarak was in jail and everything but if you looked at it I mean every time Cici was on stage like he was on camera somewhere it's just nothing but four stars

flanking them on either side and if you look at something like the 20 was it 15 or 16 attempt against Erdogan and I remember when they first went on the people who were pushing the push or coup whatever you want to call I guess this would be a push

in loot walks terms. And I remember watching it and seeing like, I think there was like a two star on stage talking, but then there was like a couple kernels and then there was like a captain on stage. I'm like, if you got a captain on stage for your coup, like it's over. This is not going to work. There's just no, he should be like getting coffee for somebody for all the four stars that are or else. This is not going to work. And sure enough, it didn't work. All right. Let's move on to the Pitch. Essentially, a wartime or immediately post-war phenomenon, a Puch is attempted by a formal body within the armed forces under its appointment, under its appointed leadership, excuse me. The Corne Lov-Poche is a clear example. Laveur, a general in charge of an army group in northern

Russia, attempted to seize the then-Petrograd, St. Petersburg, in order to establish a fighting regime that would prosecute the war. Had he succeeded, the city would perhaps have borne his name instead of Lenin, as it did until 1991. Liberation. A state may be said by supporters of the change to be liberated when its government is overthrown by foreign military or diplomatic intervention. A classic case of this was the installation of the communist leadership in Romania in 1947. The USSR forced to then King Michael to accept a new cabinet by threatening direct military force by the Soviet army. You ever read what Evela had to say about the Iron Guard? No, I've read a lot of Evela, but I can't remember anything about that.

It's like a 10-page article, and he said that if anybody was going to defeat Bolshevism in Europe, it would have been the Romanian Iron Guard. It would have been Georgianu and the Romanian Iron Guard. He said just because not only a nationalistic feeling, but also the orthodox, the orthodox feeling. And then just a, they had recognized the influence of certain groups in Bolshevism very early on and were writing about it. Yeah, and maybe that's why, you know, the Legionnaires probably got it worse than just about every other anti-communist group in Europe. you know, in Peteschi prison and some of the other places. Oh, man.

All right. Let me keep on here. I don't want to talk about that. It makes it. It makes me ill. War of National Liberation, Insurgency, etc. In this form of internal conflict, the aim of the initiating party is not to seize power within the state, but rather to set up a rival state structure.

This can be politically, ethnically, or religiously based, as with the Taliban, whose aim is an Afghanistan wholly converted to their own Daobandi or Wahhabi Islam, which contrives to be both the official state religion of Saudi Arabia and a rigorously fanatical ideology that denies any legitimacy whatsoever to any other form of Islam, let alone non-Muslim faiths. As for secessionist insurgencies, they are necessarily ethnically based, though ethnicity can be all in the mind, as with the Eritory. and Ethiopians, as with the Kurds of Iraq, as well as Iran and Turkey, the Somalis of Kenya and Ethiopia, the Karen people in Burma, and formerly the Nagas of India.

All right. The definition of the coup d'etat. Let me get a drink real quick. Akudata involves some elements of all these different methods by which power can be seized, but unlike most of them, the coup is not assisted by the intervention of the masses or by any large-scale form of combat by military forces. The assistance of these forms of direct force would no doubt make it easier to seize power, but it would be unrealistic to think that they would be available to the organizers of a coup.

Because we will not be in charge of the armed forces, we cannot hope to start planning of a coup with sizable military units already under our control, nor will the pre-coup government usually allow us to carry out the propaganda and organization necessary to make effective use of the broad masses of the people. A second distinguishing feature of a coup is that it does not imply any particular political orientation. Revolutions are usually leftist, while the putsch and the pronunciamiento are usually initiated by right-wing forces. A coup, however, is politically neutral, and there is noxious. no presumption that any particular policies will be followed after the seizure of power. It is true that many coups have been of a decidedly right-wing character,

but there is nothing inevitable about that. If a coup does not make use of the masses or of warfare, what instrument of power will enable it to seize control of the state? The short answer is that power will come from the state itself. The long answer makes up the bulk of this book. The following is our formal and functional. definition of a coup. A coup consists of the infiltration of a small but critical segment of the state apparatus,

which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder. And there's a footnotes for chapter one. Start chapter two and see how far we get. No, whenever you need to break off, just let me know. Chapter 2. When is a coup d'etat possible? Quoting, the Bolsheviks have no right to wait for the Congress of Soviets. They must take power immediately. Victory is assured, and there are nine chances out of ten that it will be bloodless. To wait is a crime against the revolution.

That's Vladimir, Ilyov, Lennon, October, 1917. The process of decolonization that started soon after the end of the Second War, World War, first doubled and then more than tripled the number of independent states so that the opportunities open to us have expanded in a most gratifying manner. We have to recognize, however, that not all states make good targets for our attentions. There is nothing to prevent us from carrying out a coup in, say, United Kingdom, but we would probably be unable to stay in power for more than a short time. The public and the bureaucracy have a basic understanding of the nature and legal basis of the government, and they would react in order to restore a legitimate leadership.

This reaction renders any initial success of the coup meaningless, and it would arise even though the pre-coup government may have been unpopular, and the new faces may be attractive. The reaction would arise from the fact that a significant part of the population takes an active interest in political life and regularly participates in it. This implies a recognition that, that the power of the government derives from its legitimate origin, and even those who have no reason to support the old guard, have many good reasons to support the principle of legitimacy. I guess that's really important when you have so many people,

a good percentage of your population who's actually employed by the government or living off of its teeth. Yeah, it is, and I think you see exactly what he's talking about in how the way a lot of conservatives in the United States today, you know, they can be locked up for 15 years for trespassing in the Capitol. They can be spied on for their political activity, whatever, all of these things. And they still will fall back on a constitution, you know, and it's because they do, and that's, look, that's a noble impulse. You know, I mean, it's a sense that they have that, you know, we have this, this bulwark that if we give up,

you know, we give that up, then there's going to be real chaos in the other side of it. And so we have to suffer what we must in order to sustain it. But that's that, you know, principle of legitimacy. The people hold on to long after it really has any reality to it. We are all familiar with the periodic surveys, which show that, say, 20% of the sample failed to correctly, named the prime minister, and we know that a large part of the population has only the vagus contact with politics. Nevertheless, in most developed countries, those who do take an active interest in politics form in absolute terms, a very large group. Controversial policy decisions stimulate

and bring to the surface this participation. Pressure groups are formed, letters are sent to the press and the politicians, petitions and demonstrations and demonstrations are organized, and this adds up to a continuing dialogue between the rulers and the ruled. I automatically think of Uncle Ted over socialization when I read those two paragraphs right there. This dialogue does not depend necessarily on the existence of a formally democratic political system, even in one party states where power is in the hands of a few self-appointed leaders, a muted but nevertheless active dialogue can take place. The higher organizations of the party can discuss party. decisions and in time of relative relaxation, the discussions extend to the larger numbers in the lower

echelons and to publications reflecting different currents, though only within the wider framework of the accepted ideology and the broad policy decisions of the leadership. The value of the dialogue from that takes place in non-democratic states. Let me repeat that again. The value of the dialogue that takes place in non-democratic states varies greatly. In the former Yugoslavia, for example, the Communist Party contrived. Okay, so I'm assuming these are updates that he wrote in the, he wrote in the new edition. I think what is it, the 2016 edition? Yeah, I think so.

Yeah. 2016, yeah. Yeah, yeah. In the former Yugoslavia, for example, the Communist Party contrived to remain in control for decades while nevertheless functioning to an increasing extent as a semi-open forum for increasingly free, increasingly wide-ranging debates on major political issues. The press, though, unable to assert truly independent opinions, at least echo those debates. In the process, while there was still no democracy, the population evolved from subjection to participation,

learning to scrutinize and question orders instead of simply obeying them, so that they were increasingly likely to resist a coup. In the Arab world, by contrast, the nominal ruling parties that functioned from the 1960s, the Arab Socialist Union of Egypt and the Ba'ath Party of Syria and Iraq, very soon degenerated into mere rubber stamps for the ruling dictators, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Havazade, and Saddam Hussein. As time went on, their pretended deference to party councils dissolved, but all along they made every significant decision by themselves, while the parties could only cheer them on. When the question came up of whether Egypt's ASU-dominated National Assembly would accept Nasser's withdrawal of his resignation following the June 1967 debacle known as the Six-Day War, an observer pointed out that the Assembly will jolly do what it is told.

You want to comment on that at all? I think it's safe to say that that was an English observer. With the Yugoslav Communist Party, the ASU, and the Rolling Bath Party now but a memory, the very greatest of questions across the entire horizon of global politics, is, of course, the future of the Zhang Guo, the Communist Party of China. Can't help you. Yeah, the Communist Party of China. Until the 2012 appointment of Xi Jinping as party general secretary,

president of the People's Republic of China and the chairman of the Central Military Commission, significantly the most powerful of all three, the party's future seemed quite predictable. It was becoming a holding company for all the public wealth and much of the private wealth of China, whereby officials continued to receive their modest salaries that did not exceed R&B 11,385, or basically $1,554, U.S. U.S. dollars per month in 2015, even in the very highest rank. Meanwhile, the party officials collected large amounts of bribes, ensuring a degree of affluence even at the village level, rising to sometimes very great wealth at the top. As a faithful fan of Beijing's top discos, I grew accustomed to seeing the young sons of party officials driving up in their Ferraris and Lamborghinis.

A little aside there by Ludvok. Yeah, a lot of those young sons of party officials, officials who were driving for our reason, Lamborghinis are the people we call political prisoners in China right now that Xi had locked up for corruption. You know, that previous part you read too, it's like, you know, it's an interesting point because, you know, it speaks to the fact like we have this bias over here in most of the West. I mean, definitely in America, that representative government, you know,

the people being gaining having representation is synonymous with democracy and I think that you know if you really think about it for more than two seconds you know we can see that there are functional democratic systems like ours like so many in Europe that don't represent their people at all that everybody's very unsatisfied with and they go their own way but that even in one party states or dictatorial states that there are other means of allowing people to dialogue with the government and express their needs and their interests. There are other ways to do it other than mass democracy. And I think, you know, there have been plenty of examples of governments throughout the 20th century. Usually, you know, they didn't last too long, partly because we placed them

in the crosshairs for one reason or another, who managed to represent their people and involve them in the participation of their own governance without having everybody go to the polls every two or four years. All right. Moving on, we're going to finish up this section before he breaks off into, before he breaks off, starts breaking off down like he did in the last section where he's doing revolution and he was doing, and we'll just finish this and I'll let you go. All right.

But the continued transformation of the Communist Party of China into a mega corporation, manned by the ambitious, duly rewarded with increasingly overt payoffs, was interrupted by the decision of Xi Jinping's high party colleagues to elevate him to a seat of unprecedented power. They did so most likely, because they feared that the party's further degeneration into an open, corrupt enterprise would lead to an outright collapse. The problem with bribes is that their distribution is very uneven, generating corrosive resentments and embarrassing leaks. As a result, Xi Jinping is left with the pretty problem of finding a substitute for both a putrefying ideology and the lost incentive of corruption with only Han nationalism ready at hand.

Still for the time being, the Communist Party persists, as does subjection rather than citizenship. I think that's actually pretty insightful, I think. I think that's a pretty clear description of what's happening, right? Yeah. Yeah. A running dialogue between rulers and the rule that precludes any coup can only exist if there is large enough section of society that is sufficiently literate, well-fed, and secure enough to talk back. Even then, certain conditions can lead to a deterioration of the

relationship, and this sometimes generates sufficient apathy or outright distrust of the regime to make a coup possible. The events of 1958 in France were marked by a formal adherence to the then-constitutional rules, but were, nevertheless, analogous to a coup. 20 years of warfare, which had included the ignatimous defeat of 1940, the German occupation, the installation of the authoritarian Vichy regime, and from 1946, long and losing continual wars in Indochina and Algeria had thoroughly undermined the country's democratic consensus. The continual changes of government had dissipated the interest and respect of most voters and left the bureaucracy leaderless because the complex business of,

the ministries could not be mastered by ministers who were only in power for months or weeks. The French army was left to fight the bitter Algerian war with little guidance from Paris authorities because, more often than not, the ministries were too busy fighting for their survival in the assembly to worry about the other bloodier war. The cost of the Algerian war in both money and lives antagonized the general public from both the army and the government, and many of the French felt a growing fear and distrust of the army's leadership, whose national sentiments and martial ideology seemed alien to many of them, and against the spirit of the times. While the structures of political life under the Fourth Republic were falling

apart, Charles de Gaulle, the grand heroic figure long-simulated retirement, gradually emerged as the only alternative to the chaos that threatened. When the army in Algeria appeared to be on the verge of truly drastic action, and yet another government was on the verge of collapse, de Gaulle was recalled. He was able to impose his own terms. On May 29, 1958, when René Coet, the last president of the Fourth Republic, called on him to form a government which was invested on June 1st, De Gaul, was given extraordinary powers to rule by decree for six months and to write a new Constitution. Under the terms of this Constitution, presented for consultation in mid-August and approved by referendum in September, elections were held in which De Gaul's newly formed union for the New Republic,

UNR Party, won a majority. On December 21st, DeGal became the first president of the 5th Republic. He was an American-style president with wide executive powers, but without an American-style Congress to restrain them. By 1958, France had become politically inert and therefore ripe for a coup. The circumstances were unique, of course, but while the political structures of all highly developed countries may seem too resilient to make them suitable targets, if acute enough, even temporary factors can weaken them fatally. Of those temporary factors, the most common are a, severe and prolonged economic crisis with large-scale unemployment and runaway inflation. B. A long and unsuccessful war or a major defeat, whether military or diplomatic.

C. Chronic instability under a multi-party system. Italy is an interesting example of an economically developed, socially dynamic, but politically fragile country. Between 1948 and circa 1990, end of the Cold War, the persistence of a large communist party that opposed Italy's alignment with the West, if less vehemently after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, forced the moderate majority to keep voting for the increasingly corrupt Democacia Christiana, D.C., which itself ruled with a smaller,

but even more corrupt socialist party, its leader of Latino Kratzi, would die a fugitive outlaw in Tunisia. Because even the two parties did not attain a parliamentary majority, every government required a broader coalition whose formation amounted to an intricate puzzle. The D.C. was the largest party, but with only 30% of the votes, it could not rule alone. Even with the Socialists, it only reached a 40% mark. If it brought in the two small left-of-center parties, the Social Democrats and the Republicans, the right-of-center parties, including the MSI neo-fascists, would not join in.

But if the latter were invited to join the coalition, the left would be. break away and no government could be formed. In the end, of course, votes were procured one way or another, mostly by handing over control of parts of the vast array of state-owned businesses, everything from oil and gas to ice cream, in exchange for parliamentary support. The votes, however, did not stay bought for long, and coalitions had short lives. Between 1945 and 1994, there were 33 governments. Until the 1994 election victory of the television and advertising, tycoon, Silvio Berlusconi, whose brand new party, Forza Italia, was originally formed by its own employees and the Milan's football team fan club. Do you remember that?

Oh, yeah, I remember. Yeah. Italian politics, you know, my buddy Daniele Bilelli, he doesn't follow. I mean, he's, you know, he's been in America for a long time, but he still can talk about it. And he, knows the 20th century pretty well. And he starts describing, telling me stories just, you know, different eras in the 20th century. And I just get lost immediately because it's just like he said, it's like a new government. Every two years, different players. It's very hard to follow.

And I did two hours on the years of lead. And it was, I mean, you're jumping from governments to government while you're, while you're explaining exactly what they were doing. Yeah, yeah. And all of these countries in Italy's, obviously such a perfect example of this, you know, there are countries that are battlegrounds in the Cold War.

And so they're facing like forces of destabilization from the outside that are kind of amorphous and hard to identify, but often, you know, very, very powerful whether you want to talk about, you know, gladio and the Soviet control, the Communist Party there. You know, that's what you've seen in a lot of these countries,

is that a lot of the chaos and instability is caused because they're being bribed for. While the D.C. was unable to modernize Italy's increasingly outdated state institutions, it nevertheless presided over decades of economic growth. The combination of communist and Catholic anti-capitalism made it impossible to introduce either American-style higher-and-fire labor flexibility or German-style economic discipline enforced by sophisticated trade unionists, but the D.C. had its own remedy. Every time wage rates were pushed too high, it devalued.

the lira to restore the competitiveness of Italian exports. Equally, the inability to make the state efficient was offset by the lax enforcement of tax collection, thus Italian entrepreneurs ill-served by an inefficient state, only had to pretend that they were paying their taxes. First one and then the other of these practices came to an end once Italy adopted the common European currency, the euro, in 1999, prohibiting competitive devaluation, and since then its economy has stagnated with little or no growth and chronically high unemployment. Politically, on the other hand, Berlusconi's combination of, A, economic power, his enterprises could offer very

many jobs, consultancies, and contracts. B, media influence through the control of publishing houses, newspapers, magazines, and three television channels, and C, of course, electoral power through the votes he won by vigorous and well-organized campaigning, ensured his political preponderance from 1994 until 2011, even went out of office. As of 2015, the government of Mateo Renzi is sustained by a parliamentary majority that still requires Berlusconi's votes. You know, it's interesting that it looks like you're about to hit the end of a section.

I'll let you get there. Yeah, and then we'll be done. will, you can close us out. Berlusconi's leading role in Italy's public life over more than 20 years has co-existed with the most blatant conflicts of interest. He was operating state-regulated businesses,

a long series of trials for tax evasion and vote-buying, and numerous personal scandals arising from his delight in cavorting with young or very young prostitutes. Hence, his prominence in Italian politics is quite enough to describe the country's political order as, fragile. He could not have survived in a fully functioning democracy that requires of its leader

some semblance of discretion in their personal conduct and the careful concealment of significant conflicts of interest. Yeah, I was going to say in the case of de Gaulle and even Berlusconi, I think you can speak of in the same way. You have two, you had two countries where, to go back to Max Weber's terms, where that legal rational authority system is breaking down are becoming decrepit and having to turn back to a charismatic leader who can come in and actually be the organizing principle for the state because, you know, the machinery itself is too gummed up. I think both of those, I mean, especially DeGaul, you know, where they were very aware of the fact that they were, they were reaching this, this point of crisis in the government.

And they turned to him almost in a, you know, Paraclean sort of Cincinnati's type of way to be the guy who has the weight who can come in and be that guy. And Berlusconi wasn't quite that direct, but just the fact that he stayed in power as long as he did in a system that had previously been so unstable and just changing out all the time, it kind of shows you that he played that role as well. You know, you see that very often where,

I mean, you see that in a person like Putin, right, for example. You know, people in the United States who watch regime media, you know, often have this idea of Putin in all dictators, really, and even like historical monarchs or whatever, but they have this idea that, you know, these are like God emperors who can just, you know, order the top generals of the army to be tortured and executed with their families and nothing will happen because they're in charge.

And obviously that's never been reality. It's not reality. You look at somebody like Putin. Why is Putin there? Putin is there because he's the only person in Russia. who all the different power centers, all the different interest groups that have and can wield organized power, he's the only person that they actually trust to mediate and arbitrate their, you know, their conflicts of interest and their disputes. And they know that if they get rid of that

guy, you know, maybe I want to take his place. You know, I'm from this interest group or that power center and I want to be Putin. I want to take his place. But I know that if I get up there, I'm not going to have the buy-in of all of these people and my power is not going to last. And so, you know, that's the source of like real sustainable power in a person like that. It doesn't, you know, you can exercise all the force you want. But unless you're, well, I wouldn't even say unless, because I was going to cite Stalin, but that's not even really true. Like, you can exercise all the force you want.

If you're not, if you're not able to occupy that central position as the one that's recognized, as like if we get rid of that person, then we're all going to fall into chaos, then you're not going to sustain your power. Let me conclude by asking you a question. So say there is this, we're looking at an election this year and one side has this plan. Let's call it Project 2025. And anyone who, someone who, someone, may have looked at it and been like, huh, this looks like it wants to dismantle the administrative state. With dismantling the administrative state in the United States and giving the power back to the three branches of government and basically, like, return, even returning the power of the presidency

to FDR levels, would that be considered a coup? I think Lutlock would say no. but the sort of the level of almost extraordinary action that would really be necessary to carry that out would meet the threshold.

You know what I mean? Like it's something that would face so much resistance that you would have to be willing to override you know technical rules and legal boundaries in order to carry it out. And so in that sense, you know, I suppose you could call it a coup, you know. It's an illegal seizure of power, illegal exercise of power for the purpose of transferring the center of gravity in the government

from one place to another. So I guess you could maybe say that. Cool. And by saying that, I'm totally okay with it, and they should do it, by the way. Yeah, I'm 100%. I mean, of course, you can be so blackpilled to the point where it's just like, Just get some of it done, please. I mean, I'll be happy with some of it. But, you know, really, I think as Yarvin has said over and over again, if you're going to cross the Rubicon, you can't wait on the other side. And you can't wade in the water on the other side.

And if you do climb onto the shore, you can't set up camp there. You have to keep going. And the only way you're going to dismantle the administrative state is to keep going. So, yeah. Never take the black pill. Despair is a sin. Oh, yeah, man. Tell everybody where they can find your work.

I have a podcast, the Martyr Made podcast. If you like really a long-form deep dive historical podcast, then that's the one for you. I do another one with my friend Jocko Willink called The Unravelling, where we talk more about contemporary and sort of more recent historical stuff, 20th century things, stuff like that. And I've got a substack. If you really, really like those things, you can come support me at Martyrmaid at Substack.com. I appreciate it. Always good, Pete. Keep pushing boundaries.

Later, brother. Bye.